


Fire is the hunger in everything

by sulkybender



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Body Image, Domestic Violence, Eating Disorder Recovery, Eating Disorders, F/M, Hurt Zuko (Avatar), Hurt/Comfort, I think we all know Ozai is an alcoholic, Iroh (Avatar) is a Good Uncle, Iroh probably also needs a hug, M/M, Ozai (Avatar) is an Asshole, Rape Recovery, Self-Harm, Sexual Assault, Size Kink, Smut, Song is under-explored as a romantic partner for Zuko, Song: also on the hug list, Weight Gain, Weight Issues, Zuko (Avatar) Angst, Zuko (Avatar) Gets a Hug, Zuko (Avatar) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Zuko (Avatar) Needs a Hug, Zuko (Avatar) whump, Zuko (Avatar)-centric, but it's loving smut, non-ideal coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:14:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 18
Words: 21,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25941946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sulkybender/pseuds/sulkybender
Summary: Now that Zuko knew what hunger was, he could see it everywhere. It was the combustion happening silently in leaves, grass, the heat on the back of his hands, the menace at the heart of the sun. Hunger was fire, eternal consumption. He had never understood his bending so well as he understood it now.Or, for that matter, his father.Zhao tortures Zuko. Song and Iroh try to make him whole. Dark-chocolate angst with a peanut-butter center.Or: Zuko survives an eating disorder.*updated summary to better reflect content*
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Ozai (Avatar), Iroh & Ursa (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Song/Zuko (Avatar), Zhao/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 112





	1. Hunger/if you can't stand the light

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first ATLA fanfiction, and my first fanfiction generally since--ballpark--2007. Please be kind for that reason, but also because this material is very personal for me. It's about overcoming trauma and grappling with weight issues, struggling towards body acceptance. This is about when your body HAPPENS to you: when you have no control and need to reckon with the consequences. It isn't something I've seen before in ATLA fanfiction. 
> 
> To skip the rape scenes, proceed to Chapter Three. 
> 
> I want to note here that several characters speak negatively about weight in a way that doesn't reflect my own views. Also, as the tags indicate, this is a story about rape and eating disorders, so if either of these are triggers for you, please do what's best for you.
> 
> That said... comments and kudos are so deeply appreciated!

He closed the door.

The prince was pinned against the wall, his wrists and feet chained to the floor. When Zhao summoned a small flame, he could make out the barest edges of his face, sharp and white, his ponytail like a shadow across his back.

“What do you want?” Zuko’s voice was tired, his voice soft but accusatory.

Zhao laughed quietly. He moved closer and extended the flame until he could see Zuko’s shoulders, his chest, his crouching legs. Zuko had the sense that he was being examined, and as the flame passed over him it left a zone of cold behind that stole his breath. He hated Zhao, but he leaned forward slightly. He would take warmth where he could find it.

“My prince,” Zhao said finally, pulling the flame back.

With his other hand, he cupped Zuko’s jaw. His fingers were rougher than Zuko had expected for an admiral, the callouses almost nicking his skin. Zuko flinched, closing his eyes. The fingers moved carefully up, like Zhao was blind, feeling out a sense of his face. Zhao came to the edges of his scar and paused, stroking the ridges beneath his eye.

Zuko cried out. He knew he was going to burn again, he could feel it.

But Zhao bent down and kissed him roughly, pulling Zuko’s face to his. Abruptly he broke off. He wiped his mouth.

“What do you want?” Zuko repeated, confused, angry.

Zhao chuckled.

“Don’t you get it,” he said softly. He yanked Zuko’s head up by his hair, smashing his tongue into his mouth again. “I want everything.”

—

Zhao had taken him at the port. He had been there with his uncle, trying to barter away a half-starved ostrich-horse for enough rations to get them to Ba Sing Se. Zuko was haggling with a vegetable peddler, Iroh examining tchotchkes at a stall across the way. Then a bag slipped over Zuko’s head, his arms were yanked and twisted behind his back, and he was thrown into the back of a carriage, where someone smacked his head once sharply and he passed out.

When Zuko woke up he was here, a dark place that rocked enough he knew it was a ship’s hold, too wide and empty to warm. His uncle, Zhao warned him, was being held in a room overhead. If Zuko resisted, if he made any trouble, Iroh would be killed.

A day passed before Zuko saw Zhao again. When the light came, it was too bright; his eyes stung, he looked away.

“My prince,” Zhao said. “How am I going to see you, if you can’t stand the light?”

He shut the door and lit the cluster of torches at each side.

“What kind of Fire Lord,” Zhao asked softly, “is afraid of fire?”

“I’m not,” Zuko said, but his voice cracked. He hadn’t had food or water since he was pulled aboard the ship. The sides of his throat stuck together and tore when he tried to speak.

“I’ve brought something for you.” Zhao set a covered basket on the ground and rummaged inside. Zuko expected something terrible—a whip, a blade—but Zhao pulled out a flask and pushed it to the prince’s lips.

Zuko drank greedily, expecting water. It was wine. The alcohol stung his throat as badly as the light had stung his eyes, and he coughed, pushed his head aside. Zhao pushed it back.

“You’ll finish it.”

Zuko tried again, drinking until he sputtered and the wine spilled down his shirt, leaving a wide stain.

“What a shame,” Zhao said. “We’ll have to take care of that.”

He pulled his dagger from his waist. Slowly he pressed the tip against Zuko’s chest, at the heart of the stain. A little blood mingled with the wine. Then he swiped the blade down.

Zuko cried out, but it was his shirt that fell open. Zhao breathed heavily into his face. He smelled like he had been drinking himself. “Oh God,” he said, staring at Zuko’s white chest. “Oh, my prince.” He cut the rest of the shirt off and dropped his dagger, pushing his hands against Zuko’s chest. The skin was smooth and soft there, undamaged. He ran his fingers over it, tracing the prince’s ribs. Very slowly he kissed each one.

Zuko was frozen with fear.

“So tense,” Zhao sighed.

He lunged forward, sucking on Zuko’s neck, moving up until he reached his jaw, his rabbity pulse. He nipped Zuko’s ear.

“You can see how hungry I am,” Zhao whispered. “Are you hungry?”

Zuko only looked at him, dazed.

Zhao turned toward the basket and pulled out a steamed bun, which he unwrapped carefully.

“I’ll have to feed you myself, you know. I can’t unchain you.”

He pushed the bun against Zuko’s mouth.

The flood of saliva was almost violent. Zuko couldn’t remember hunger like this, perhaps because he had never been so hungry and so terrified at once. He ate the bun in a few bites, Zhao pushing it against his lips. When he had finished, Zhao pulled out another and shoved it into his mouth. While he struggled to chew, Zhao began kissing his neck again, his hands kneading Zuko’s crotch.

“You’re so hungry, aren’t you,” Zhao breathed into his ear. He squeezed Zuko’s cock. Zuko couldn’t control himself; he felt a stutter of something like electricity and he bent forward, winded. Zhao laughed.

“Tell me, my prince,” Zhao commanded, squeezing tighter. “Tell me how hungry you are.”

Zuko tried to control his breathing.

“Tell me!”

“I’m hungry,” Zuko said. He was stifling tears, not well. Zhao licked them from his face.

“By the time I’m through with you,” Zhao began, cutting through the prince’s trousers, but he trailed off when he saw Zuko’s slim thighs, his weeping cock, and began running his hands all down his body. “My God,” he said, cupping Zuko’s ass. “To think you were trying to keep this hidden from me.”

Zuko was crying harder now, looking off into the distance behind Zhao’s shoulder as he ground his stiff cock against the prince’s leg.

“You’ll look at me when I’m feeding you,” Zhao said sharply, pushing Zuko’s face toward his. “You’ll look at me. And by the time I’m through with you, you’ll know what hunger is.”

—

Zhao came in the mornings with his basket, a flask of wine, steamed buns. He forced the wine down Zuko’s throat and when he had finished, he licked what was left from Zuko’s lips. He gave Zuko enough to keep him confused, woozy, his eyes black and dazed. Then he fucked him. It was easy to fuck him when he was drunk on an empty stomach, dazzled by the torchlight, although sometimes when Zhao had finished, Zuko vomited. Zhao would rub his bare back—he was always bare now, Zhao never gave him new clothes after cutting his first pair away—and wash his mouth out with wine, and kiss his neck softly as he cried.

“You’re so beautiful,” Zhao said. “My beautiful prince.”

Then he would take out the buns, always more than the day before, and push them against Zuko’s mouth until he had eaten them all. If he hesitated, Zhao would place his hand against Zuko’s scar and warm it slightly, by slow degrees, until the skin started to sting and burn. “Are you afraid of fire, Prince Zuko?” he whispered.

At night Zhao brought more wine, richer food. He fucked Zuko slowly, knowing they had all the time in the world. As the weeks passed he noticed with pleasure the soft flesh forming at Zuko’s stomach, the way his chest began to sag, the fine muscles dissolving. As his thighs grew plump, Zhao began to fuck him there, between the tight delicious space.

When Zhao had finished, he emptied whatever was left of the wine into Zuko and left him there, sprawled on the floor. He was usually in the same position when Zhao entered in the morning. It was hard to tell if he slept. His eyes were usually swollen in the morning, whether from the alcohol or from the crying Zhao didn’t know, and he kissed them tenderly.

Two months into his captivity, Zuko must have gained sixty pounds, eighty. He had a soft gut that grew hard on alcohol and food, breasts that Zhao fondled like a woman’s. His face was almost unrecognizable, except for the scar that marked him, stretching as he grew. It was erotic, Zhao thought, the way Zuko’s thighs shuddered as Zhao fucked him, the angry purple welts where his skin had stretched too quickly, the way he wheezed if Zhao made him stand. His cock began to vanish behind folds of flesh. Sometimes Zhao jerked him off and he could feel Zuko’s heart race wildly, like it would veer off and crash.

“You’re mine,” Zhao told him when Zuko clutched his chest, gasping. “That’s mine, you’re mine.”

A hundred pounds, a hundred fifty, two hundred. As his body grew, his hunger grew, and when Zhao opened the door in the morning or evening, he could see the relief in Zuko’s face. There was a kind of pain that ended when Zhao came, and while that wasn’t love, Zhao wanted it. He fed Zuko until he vomited, and then he would feed Zuko to make up for the food he had wasted, burying his face in his enormous belly, squeezing his enormous ass. There was too much for Zhao to hold, so much for him to mark.

Zhao had never seen anything like it, this thing he had done to Zuko. There wouldn’t have been any clothes large enough to cover him even if Zhao had wanted to. The prince began to develop sores on his sides that Zhao dressed at the end of each session; the smell was acrid, like the prince was rotting from the inside, although it was hard to distinguish from the general stench, since Zhao rarely bathed him. He loved to see Zuko marinating in his own blood, and in Zhao’s cum.

Eventually there were no chains wide enough to hold his wrists and ankles, so Zhao cut him free, but there wasn’t any fight left in Zuko; he lay there, shuddering deliciously, and Zhao fucked him between every fold. Abundance, abundance so terrible it took Zhao’s breath away.

“You know why you’re mine,” Zhao whispered into his ear. He kneaded Zuko’s heavy breasts, digging in his nails until the prince moaned. “You’re mine because no one else would ever want you now.”


	2. Rescue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first ATLA fanfiction, and my first fanfiction generally since--ballpark--2007. Please be kind for that reason, but also because this material is very personal for me. It's about overcoming trauma and grappling with weight issues, struggling towards body acceptance. This is about when your body HAPPENS to you: when you have no control and need to reckon with the consequences. It isn't something I've seen before in ATLA fanfiction. 
> 
> To skip the rape scenes, proceed to Chapter Three. 
> 
> I want to note here that several characters speak negatively about weight in a way that doesn't reflect my own views. Also, as the tags indicate, this is a story about rape and eating disorders, so if either of these are triggers for you, please do what's best for you.
> 
> That said... comments and kudos are so deeply appreciated!

One morning Zhao didn’t come. There were muffled booms overhead, the choked sounds of frantic scuffling, and from the vibrations in the floor of the hull it was easy to assume that the crew was engaged in battle. The noise went on for hours. Then for a long time there was almost no sound at all.

There was a distant clanging, like someone stamping through the passageways of the ship, before the door opened and a soft voice called out. 

“Oh fuck,” Zuko whispered. He covered his face.

“Nephew?”

There was a flash as Iroh lit the torches, a sharp intake of breath.

“Go!” Zuko hissed. “Don’t look at me, please, go, _please_ —”

Iroh dimmed the torches to the barest flame.

“Nephew,” he said quietly. “If you don’t want me to look at you, I will not look at you. But I will not leave you.”

Zuko began sobbing.

His uncle knelt beside him. Even in the half-dark, eyes averted, he could see what had become of Zuko: his horrifically swollen body, the reek of bedsores, the cum and blood clotting his hair and skin. He smelled like alcohol and violence.

He hid his shock as well as he could, not wanting to lose Zuko’s trust.

“I have a little water, Zuko,” he said calmly. “Let me clean you, and we’ll get you covered and warm.”

Zuko didn’t answer, heaving into his hands.

His uncle poured a little water into a washcloth he kept in his bag, warming it lightly with his hands before placing it gently on Zuko’s shoulder. Zuko stiffened, inhaled sharply.

“There’s no one here, Zuko. It’s only me. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

“Please don’t say it,” Zuko said. “You don’t understand what it’s doing to me. Don’t say it.”

“Your name?”

“Don’t look at me, Uncle!”

“I won’t look at you.”

Gently Iroh washed his shoulders, his arms, the soft pads of his hands. There was grime and blood between Zuko’s nails, which he had bitten down low. Iroh tried to breathe through his mouth so that he wouldn’t gag on the stench. He would need a long soak in a good bath to get truly clean. But there was meaning in this first cleansing, less a cleansing than an exorcism. Hesitantly he brought the washcloth to Zuko’s chest.

Zuko forced his hand away.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarled.

“Zuko.”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t say it. Don’t name me.”

Iroh wrung out the washcloth, warmed it again, and began cleaning Zuko’s face. There were bruises underneath the blood and filth, under the folds of his chin. His eyebrows were clotted with it. Zuko’s tears burned down his face and met his uncle’s hands. Iroh wiped them away too.

“My sweet boy,” Iroh said. His nephew inhaled sharply, if he’d been stung by the words.

Zuko’s hair was long, reaching down to his waist, and matted with dried blood and come. Iroh tried at first to loosen the knots before realizing the task was impossible.

“Your hair is quite tangled. We may need to cut it back. Will you let me do that?”

“Get rid of it,” Zuko said softly.

Iroh pulled out a long dagger. He wrapped Zuko’s hand around the hilt so he could feel the familiar shape.

“It’s the one I gave you, nephew. Do you remember?”

Zuko turned his face away.

Gently Iroh lifted his nephew’s head and gathered his hair, shearing it cleanly off. He placed the shorn ponytail to one side, reverently. He kneaded the washcloth clean, wet it freshly, and began massaging Zuko's head. Cautiously he navigated around the cuts and bumps, easing back when Zuko hissed and clutched his arm. At one point Iron found a bald patch above his nephew's ear, where the hair had been torn away, and he had to pause for a long time. Then he pressed his lips to the bare skin and kept going.

Iroh reached again for the washcloth. When he placed it on Zuko’s chest, the prince bucked, shoving his hand back.

“ _Please_ don’t touch me,” Zuko repeated desperately. “ _Please_. I keep telling you and you won’t listen.”

Iroh began to understand. It was his breasts, his stomach, the heavy folds that covered even his crotch, neutering him. The sores that festered on his bottom and back.

“Zuko, are you ashamed of your body?”

Zuko sobbed, breathing frantically.

Gathering his strength, Iroh pulled Zuko to a sitting position, leaning his nephew against his chest.“Shhh,” he murmured. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.”

His nephew’s heartbeat was out of control. Iroh was alarmed, understanding finally that it might stop.

“Breathe in, breathe out. You must breathe evenly. It will steady you.”

“I don’t—I don’t know—” Zuko gasped.

“You had no power over what happened. But you have the power to control it now.”

“I don’t know who—I—” His breath hitched and he grabbed Iroh’s wrist, squeezing hard. “Uncle!”

“Do you need me to tell you?”

“I don’t—how—I’m trying—to tell you!”

“I’m here, nephew.”

“I did—” Zuko sucked in air. “I did whatever he asked of me!”

Iroh pulled Zuko tightly to his chest.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

The darks of Zuko’s eyes shrunk to pinpricks. He stuttered forward.

“Nephew!”

Zuko fell onto his face, jerking on the floor. And then he did not move at all.

—

It was daylight when Zuko woke up. He had forgotten what that meant. There was a soft glow from the window, and he was in a bed for the first time he could remember with any certainty. The days before his capture had blurred and vanished. There had been daylight there, and beds.

“Zuko.”

His uncle was sitting across from him in a chair, beaming. He reached for Zuko’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

“You had a heart attack. You’re all right now, but you must be careful. I was traveling with a healer. She saved much of your heart but some of the tissue has died. It is not as strong as it once was. You must have had a few smaller ones when… before I found you.”

Zuko closed his eyes.

“You will recover. I promise you.”

He remembered what had happened, the long months in the dark, feeding even as he was wasting away, too nauseous and drunk to move. He could feel his hands trembling and knew this was what he had heard about: the quivering of withdrawal, the beginning of the nightmares.

“Nephew. Are you cold?”

“I’m drunk, Uncle,” Zuko spat. “I’m a fucking drunk.”

He rolled to one side, turning his back to Iroh, and felt the cool air on his skin. Iroh covered him with a blanket, and as his fingers brushed against Zuko’s shoulders, he could feel his uncle shaking.

“I’m sorry, Zuko. We don’t—I have tried, but we don’t have anything for you yet.”

No clothes that would fit him. Of course. He smashed his face into his pillow.

“But we will,” Iroh said. “You are still too weak to walk around safely, but I have set up a regimen of stretches we can perform while you’re still in bed. The healer will come and massage you, to restore bloodflow. You’ll regain your strength.”

He hated hearing his uncle’s voice, the tenderness he didn’t deserve.

“Did I piss myself while I was asleep?” he said hoarsely.

“Zuko?”

“Did I vomit,” he said. “Did I break the bed.”

“You shouldn’t talk about yourself this way.”

“How should I fucking talk about myself then?” Zuko shouted. He shot fire across the room. A fern by the window went up in flames, dissolved instantly to ash.

“Did I have nightmares,” he whispered.

He had seen it happen to drunks before, in the navy. The way they shook by day and tossed at night, the things they saw that were unseeable, stalking them. He would see Zhao again. He knew that was coming for him. It was inevitable. His heart seized up.

He felt his uncle’s hand squeeze his shoulder tightly.

“What’s left of me, Uncle?”

“You’re my beautiful boy,” Iroh choked. He pulled Zuko to his chest, feeling hot tears soak his robes.

“Are you _blind_?” Zuko wept.

“Listen to me, Zuko. There are people in this world who are so twisted, they become poisoned with envy. They see something beautiful and want to break it. ” He kissed Zuko’s head. “And they lose interest when they have broken its beauty. But Zhao could never break you. He knew that. And that is why he did not stop.”

“You’re a fucking deluded old man,” Zuko sobbed, but he hugged Iroh fiercely. “Please don’t leave me.”


	3. Earth Kingdom girl

When he woke again, there was a hand on his chest, a soft coolness radiating from it. A face regarding him, brown hair falling down her shoulders.

“The Earth Kingdom girl,” Zuko croaked.

“I have a name,” she said. “If you remember it.”

He closed his eyes. “Song.”

“And I know yours now,” Song said, although she did not say it. Her hand tightened on his chest.

“You didn’t tell me you were a waterbender.”

“You didn’t tell me you were the Fire Prince.”

“Well,” he said. “Now I’m not.” He gasped slightly, a sharp pain jabbing at his heart. “Urghh!”

“Shhhh.” The water clinging to her hand grew cold, sunk deep into his chest. “I’ll take care of you, but you have to be willing to take care of yourself.”

“You don’t understand,” he choked, tears stinging his face. “There’s nothing left of me.”

Song took his hand. She squeezed his fingers.

“If there was nothing left,” she said softly, “I wouldn’t be here.” 

Outside it was gray, rain pattering against the windows. There were a few candles scattered on the nightstand, on the desk against the rear wall. He watched them sink and swell.

“I think I must have always been a monster,” Zuko rasped. “I took your ostrich-horse. You healed my uncle and you fed us and I was ungrateful.”

“You weren’t the best guest. But that doesn’t make you a monster.”

“You showed me your leg. You showed me the burns.”

“Zuko,” she said. “You need to calm down. You need to protect your heart. Do you understand?” She squeezed his hand again. Her fingers were warm. He had thought he would never be warm again.

“I don’t want anyone to look at me,” he said. “If you take care of me, can you try not to look at me?”

Song leaned in, holding his face in her hands. Then she bent down and kissed him softly on the lips. Zuko’s heart jolted for a moment—he didn’t know where he was, he felt Zhao’s calloused fingers squeezing his breasts, his hands kneading his belly, sliding his cock between the folds and thrusting—and he moaned.

“ButI want to look at you. You’re beautiful.”

Song kissed the corner of his eye and it felt so gentle, he lost the feeling in his hands. It was stunning to him, being taken care of. His heart rate eased down. The candles flared and settled. But in the moment where he hadn’t known where he was, he had pissed himself.

He started crying again. “I’m so sorry.”

“Please, don’t apologize.” She peeled back the sheets. He closed his eyes, wishing that was enough to make him invisible. “Lean into me, okay? We’ll get you up and put a nice set of clean sheets on the bed.”

He pulled the sheets back over his head.

“Should I get your uncle?”

“Please, please, just cover me.”

“Zuko, I took care of you for days before you were awake. You don’t need to be—”

“But I am,” he said through tears. “So ashamed.”

“The blanket is clean. Once you’re up I’ll wrap you in it. Okay?”

He rolled to the side and she helped him to the floor, propping him up against the wall. Song didn’t trust the chairs to hold him, but she hoped he didn’t know that. She pulled the blanket from the bed and wound him gently inside. She rubbed his shoulders. “See? It’s going to be okay, Zuko.”

“I…” Zuko searched for the words, his face burning. “Can you hold me again?”

She settled beside him, her arms taking up as much of him as she could.

“You’re beautiful,” Song repeated. “You’re safe here. Your uncle and I are going to take care of you.” She kissed his eyes and he had that feeling again, like he had left his body altogether.

“Why do you care about me, after what I’ve done?”

“Because I know who you are,” she said. “And I don’t mean your name.”


	4. Dying all the time

The hunger was constant, unbearable. He couldn’t say anything. It was humiliating, to be so gigantic and still so hungry. When his uncle brought him broth on a tray, Zuko gaped at it, his mouth gone numb.

“It’s okay to eat, nephew. You have to survive.”

Zuko turned his head away.

“I brought a bowl for me as well,” Iroh said. He squeezed Zuko’s hand. “We’ll eat together, like old times.”

He settled in a chair next to the bed, placing one of the bowls on the side-table. He started eating, humming an old song contentedly. Zuko stared at him.

“Nephew, we have to build up your strength.”

It had been a week since the heart attack. At first Iroh and Song had to turn him over regularly, because he was too weak and enormous to move, and had weeping bedsores. Now Zuko could roll himself over, with effort, and he could sit up for short stretches, but he couldn’t stand. Moving was painful, both because of actual pain and because he could feel the full expanse of his skin, exposed to the air, trembling. Moving reminded him that he had a body. He didn’t have to remember if he was still, and asleep.

In the mornings Iroh and Song helped lift him from the bed to change his sheets. He had wracking nightmares and often soiled himself from terror. When the bed was fresh, they helped him settle again. Song checked his heart. Then she and Iroh each took an arm and began massaging his skin, helping the blood to flow. They lifted his heavy legs, the knees that bent inward, the swollen calves. Here Song often paused and bent her head to his legs, as if listening. His legs were what worried them most. His circulation was poor, and until he lost weight he would be at risk of losing them. As they kneaded his legs they asked often whether he could feel this spot, or this. Where he was numb, Song pressed her hands deep into his flesh, pushing healing water far below the skin, feeding networks of veins that were always slowly dying.

Zuko was dying all the time.

They asked him to lift his arms, which was difficult but not impossible, and to try as hard as he could to move his legs. Most days he couldn’t bring himself to try. He was defeated, he was dying, he was a monster. He was hungry all the time.

“You have to try, nephew. All I ever ask is that you try.”

In the afternoons Iroh read to him, told him old stories, ran his hands through Zuko’s darkhair. He described what it looked like on the island, beyond the modest window where Zuko could see cherry trees, sunlight settling on their branches like frost. He told Zuko it was okay to speak or not speak, that he could talk about what had happened to him or say nothing at all. Zuko still hadn’t told him about the terrible lie—that he hadn’t resisted because he thought Zhao was keeping his uncle in another room, ready to hurt the old man if Zuko fought back. He thought he might never tell Iroh, because it might destroy him.

“Zuko.”

Iroh wrapped his hand around the spoon, moving it toward the bowl.

“It’s only broth. It won’t hurt you.”

The prince let his fingers fall open, let the spoon drop.

“Zuko, if you won’t eat I’m going to have to feed you.”

Zuko gasped, his hands shaking. It came to him in a flash: Zhao’s fingers pushing into his mouth, a steamed bun forced down his throat, wine burning and numbing him. Zhao’s hands moving over his belly, his teeth nipping at his earlobe, the electric surge in his crotch.

That was the other terrible thing he could never tell Iroh: that he had wanted this, that food was love, erotic, and it was self-harm and destruction, that food was the thing he did to himself when he wanted to be touched, and it was ecstasy, sometimes, Zhao’s mouth on his breasts, sucking on his double chin, fucking the dips and turns of his body, shoving something down his throat, smoothing his back as he vomited. He had come to crave it because that was the only thing there was, the dark vacuum and Zhao, and he knew what he had become but Zhao said he loved him anyway, and Zhao came in his mouth. He swallowed everything.

“Zuko!”

The prince shoved the tray off the bed, the bowl breaking against the floor. He pulled the covers over his head and retched quietly underneath. Nothing came up. He felt his uncle’s hands rubbing his back. They were warm, he was warm, he wasn’t in the dark any longer.

“My boy,” Iroh said softly.

“Uncle—I’m so sorry.”

Iroh eased the blanket off Zuko’s face, looking into his eyes. They were dilated, the gold eaten up with black. Zuko looked at him without seeing him.

“I don’t want you to talk about anything that makes you uncomfortable, nephew. But I’m beginning to think that until you do, we won’t know how to help you.”

In the evenings Song came to sit with him, kneading his hands until they were warm. She didn’t kiss him again because he was so afraid and confused, wanting to be touched but unable to peel the desire for touch away from his desire for Zhao, his awareness of his body. So she combed his hair with her fingers.

“I know you don’t want this,” she said, touching the softness beneath his chin and meaning everything, the whole of him. “But think about what it means to have a body. It means being in the world, being in the present. Letting yourself move. It can be captivity, but it’s also freedom. Even the pain of it—it’s how we navigate the world. It’s how we know who we are.”

Zuko choked her name.

“We can heal you, but you have to _try_ , Zuko.”

He reached up and touched the side of her face. For a moment he was free. Then he saw himself as Song must, his doughy hand pawing at her face, and he knew he was pathetic, he was a monster. He wanted to feed, he wanted Zhao’s cock in his ass, he wanted Zhao’s teeth biting his ear. He was all need, a raw nerve. Sometimes he felt like he was navigating the world without any skin at all.

He was in the room with his uncle again, slowly drinking broth.

“I just wish you would let me die,” Zuko said.


	5. Driving out the ghosts

“Let me get in bed with you,” Song said.

“Wha—”

She pulled back the sheets and slid in next to him, lifting Zuko’s arm and settling underneath. She nestled into him. Wherever she touched him, he felt little shocks under his skin.

She rested her hand on his stomach, kissing his chest twice tenderly. It had been almost a month since his rescue. His old face was starting to emerge, the swelling around his eyes retreating. He hadn’t known that he couldn’t really see until he could again. The world looked sharper, less difficult.

Song pulled the covers over their heads. She kissed him in the warm darkness. He groaned.

“We’re going to drive out the ghosts, okay?” She pressed her lips to his neck, to his shoulder, the fragile skin of his wrists. “This is yours again. And this. And this.”

“Song.”

She pressed her face into his sagging breasts, the loose skin where he was beginning to shrink back. She kissed the folds. “No more ghosts,” she murmured. Zuko could feel his face burning, his body stiffen with shock and shame. He pushed her back.

“Stop it, okay?” he said. “It’s not a joke!”

“If you could see what I see—” She kissed his breasts again.

“My body is not a joke!” he shouted, shoving her back.

He felt the impact as she hit the wall.

“Song!”

Zuko threw back the covers, struggling heavily to his feet. She was curled up on the floor, huddled with pain and surprise, and when he helped her upright, he could feel the way she flinched at his touch.

“It wasn’t a joke,” she said.

“I’m a monster,” he said softly. “I hurt you.”

“You’re not a monster.” He could hear impatience in her voice for the first time, exasperation. “But you did hurt me.”

He leaned forward, cradled her face in his hands. He felt her pulse catch under his fingers.

“I don't know what you want me to do,” Song said. “I care about you. I care about your soul and I care about your body, because I care about _all of you_. And you get so furious when I do. It's like I'm supposed to love you without loving you. It doesn't make any sense.” 

“Maybe I don't want your pity,” Zuko said bitterly.

Angry tears bit at her eyes.

“Believe me,” she said. “I have no pity for you at all.”

Zuko was silent for a long time.

“Listen to me,” he said. “He did things to me that… It wasn’t just…” He rubbed his face in frustration. “God, how am I supposed to talk about this?”

“Come here.”

He sat beside her, propped against the wall. Song brushed the hair back from his face.

“Zuko, I know what he did. You don’t have to tell me. When your uncle brought me to you—I could see it.”

He had been sprawled on the ground, jerking, biting through his lip. Song and Iroh had turned him over, Iroh holding his nephew’s head in his lap while she pooled water into her hands. It gleamed briefly before vanishing into his chest. It was like putting out a fire, she remembered thinking. She could feel the pathways the water took, moving through the burned-out districts of his heart. There was older damage here.

“This isn’t the first one,” she told Iroh then, watching his face sink. He kissed his nephew’s forehead.

“He’s so young.”

“I don’t understand what happened,” Song said.

Iroh had glanced at Zuko’s body and her eyes followed him along the contours. The dirt, the cum, the puss seething in his sides, the trails of dried blood down his legs where he had been raped and raped and left. She had closed her eyes again and pulled the water through his heart, like threading a needle, following the clotted arteries, the networks of veins dying in his hands and feet, a history of neglect.

“When you touch me,” Zuko was saying to her now, “I can feel him in that. Underneath.”

He was shaking.

Song tugged the blanket off the bed, wrapping it around them both. She nestled into his chest.

“Why do you think I want to drive out the ghosts?”

“I don’t know if you can heal me that way.”

“Can’t we try?”

She kissed the soft place beneath his ear, his palms, his fingertips. “That’s yours,” she said. She ran her hands in slow, smooth circles over his back. “That’s yours.” She touched his breasts again and he stiffened.

“You can’t let the shame take your body from you, Zuko.”

She kissed his nipples, his sides, every inch of his stomach. He thought he might die from the way she made him feel, burning up with desire and humiliation all at once.

“This is yours.”

“I don’t want it to be.”

“You won’t always be what he made you,” she said. She sunk her hands between the folds of his sides, and it felt like she was reaching through him. He gasped.

“Song, I—”

She kissed each fold, the scar tissue where the sores had healed, the dimples and pock marks where the fat had burst through his skin. She kissed his mouth and he surged forward, drank her. He was famished, lightheaded, he was drunk again, he wanted her. He didn’t know where he was. She could see the light leave his eyes.

“Zuko.”

He was always on the ship, and he was always in the future, some distant place where he had been distorted into pure want. He wanted to consume her. He had the violent urge to throw her into the wall again, to become the kind of man who threw women into walls. He had dreams about transcendent violence. He told himself to stop feeling anything at all. His heart stopped pounding in his ears.

“Zuko?”

“I don’t think I’m safe to be around,” he said hoarsely. His voice was slurred. He couldn’t feel his lips.

Song squeezed his hand until the feeling came back, sharply.

“I don’t know either,” she said. “But I don’t want to leave you.”

Tears pricked at his eyes. He didn’t want her to leave, but his mouth didn’t seem to work.


	6. You are the trunk

He was lighter now, light enough to walk. Song made him a robe out of old silk sheets and helped him into it. Where he had lost weight, his body was draped with skin, and where the silk touched his belly he felt unbearable shame. Tying the knot felt like closing a door, sealing off a room he didn’t want anyone to see.

Iroh made him a staff out of cherry-wood, a tree outside the house that lightning had felled. Zuko held it in his hands for a long time and couldn’t speak. A dragon engraving scaled the length of the staff, erupting in a plume of smoke at the top, where the knob was shaped to his hand. It felt like a friend.

“The upper branches burned to charcoal,” Iroh told him, “but the trunk was strong. You are the trunk, nephew.”

“Uncle,” he whispered.

“Are you ready?” Song asked.

“I’m afraid.”

“No one is out there,” Iroh said. “The courtyard is ours. It’s just us. Well, us and a pot of ginseng.”

He smiled at Zuko.

“And the weather is warm,” Iroh said. “You can sit in the sun.”

He and Song helped him to his feet. He staggered, leaning on the staff but afraid to trust it with his weight. Song held the door open for him. The light blinded him at first and he froze, flashing again to every moment he had been in the dark, waiting to Zhao to throw out a flame. He felt Iroh’s hand guiding him to a white bench under the cherry trees. The sun on his face. He had forgotten that feeling.

Song sat beside him, tucking her head under his chin. He could see her bare legs, slim ankles crossed, the burn snaking up her left calf. Always he was stunned by how small she felt, like something he could tuck away. At night she folded perfectly under his arms. When Zuko had nightmares they were often dreams that he had crushed her. He woke up gasping, clutching at his heart. She would kiss him, half-asleep, and pull him back.

They slept together, but they never had sex. He was afraid still. It brought him back too easily to the keep, the cold floor, Zhao’s cock hot in his mouth, tearing at his ass. But he wanted her so badly it was maddening. And he was afraid she would stop wanting him.

There was a chair for Uncle, a small table set for tea, ginseng steeping in a stone pot. A plate of little biscuits he was afraid to touch. He didn’t trust himself still.

“Isn’t this nice,” Iroh said, beaming. “We can have breakfast out here every day. I’ll make little treats for us.”

“Iroh, they’re delicious!”

“Thank you, my dear. Zuko?”

“Just tea, please, Uncle.”

He was always so hungry, but if he ate the feeling only get worse, like dry tinder tossed on a fire. He felt their eyes on him as he ate and their eyes on him when he didn’t, and it was maddening. He left half his meals untouched, to show Song and Iroh that he knew restraint, but at night sometimes he pulled food from the garbage and ate it, rancid. Sometimes he crept into the kitchen and ate whole loaves of bread. They must have noticed, but they never said anything.

There was a hole in him he didn’t know how to fill without kicking a larger one open.

He took the teacup from Song’s hands and pulled her into a kiss. He felt her surprise turn into hunger as she leaned into him, holding his head with soft fingers. Zuko fed off the heat of the sun, pushing deep into her mouth, imagining he was fucking her with his tongue. He wanted to bite her open.

Now that Zuko knew what hunger was, he could see it everywhere. Hunger was energy. It was the combustion happening silently in leaves, grass, the heat on the back of his hands, the menace at the heart of the sun. Hunger was fire, eternal consumption. He had never understood his bending so well as he understood it now.

Or, for that matter, his father.

When he broke off the kiss, Iroh was looking at him, eyebrows raised. It was a good-humored expression, but there was recognition underneath, skepticism, like Zuko’s face was transparent and Iroh could see through to the shape of the thoughts underneath. Zuko was thinking he could destroy anything if he wanted to. That should have been terrifying, and it was, but it was also a comfort to him.

Zuko drank his tea slowly, pretending it was something else. Something that could satisfy him.


	7. Life is wanting/Sometimes I think he tore a hole in me

He was so hard. He drove into her again and again, grunting, and he heard her gasp as if she couldn’t quite breathe, but he had to have more of her. She was so wet. He was wet too, dripping, the physical exertion almost too much for him, his face and body red as if he had been boiled. It did feel that way, as if he was boiling alive. Her hands kneaded his breasts and he groaned, almost coming before he pulled himself back from the edge. He forced himself deeper.

“Zuko!”

He slammed into her again and again, she called his name, and with a massive twitch he emptied. He nearly collapsed on top of her, but managed to roll to one side, spent, sucking in air. She said his name.

“I think—I’m dying.”

He felt her cool hands on his forehead, his chest, seeking out his heart.

“You’re fine,” she said. “You’re okay.”

“I’m dying,” he gasped.

“Just breathe.”

Song was straddling him, dripping his warm cum over his belly. She was smiling. She kissed the sweat from his face, licked him clean in tiny strokes, and he thought he was dying again.

“I didn’t know if we could,” she said quietly into his ear.

He reached up and touched her hair, just to feel the silk between his fingers.

“Sometimes I want you so badly I—I don’t know what I’d do.” It was hard to read his face. He looked pained. “Please don’t leave me.”

“I’m right here. Why would I leave you?”

Because he was still too heavy to wear even his uncle’s clothes. Because he had dreams about being raped and woke up disappointed that he hadn’t been. Because he had dreams about raping her and he woke up hungry.

Because he was hungry.

“Because I’m gaining weight again,” he said softly.

“Zuko.”

It was true. He had been gorging at night, eating more at breakfast. He could feel how his breasts were growing heavy again, his stomach crushing him if he lay on his back at night.

She kissed his eyelids. “It’s hard, I know. I can’t imagine how hard it must be.”

“Sometimes I think he tore a hole in me,” Zuko said dully. “Sometimes I have dreams—I see you falling into it.” He shoved his head deep into the pillow and screamed. The candles surged. Scorch marks on the wall.

“Shhhh.” Song rubbed his back in slow circles. He was right, she could feel it—his body changing again. She saw how his sides shook as he screamed. It made her remember the way he was on the ship, his heart stammering in his chest, his veins dying. But she didn’t want to scare him, now that he had tried to talk about it. She wished he would talk about it more.

She and Iroh talked about it, when he was asleep. They could see what the hunger was doing to him, how it hollowed out his face and gave him empty eyes, made him irritable. Once he had threatened her. He didn’t follow through, but he didn’t apologize, just hid himself under the covers and flinched when he was touched. That was the way she framed it when she told Iroh what had happened. _He didn’t follow through._ She hated the excuses in her voice.

It wasn’t sustainable, none of it. They had been almost relieved when he started eating again, inhaling his food like he thought it would be taken from him.

“How can I help you?”

“I just have to control myself. I can’t be such a fucking _child_.”

“What is it that you want?” Song asked. “When you feel like you need to eat.”

“I just… I want to stop wanting.”

“Life is wanting.” She kissed the nape of his neck, working her way down to his tailbone.

He moaned, and the sound was half-desire and half-frustration.

“Not like this.”


	8. A visit from the princess/The rumors are true

“Get away from him!”

There was a faint crash behind the door, the sound of a body and then a decorative scroll hitting the wall, sliding to the ground. Zuko bolted upright in his bed.

“You have some nerve, peasant.”

Oh God.

“Azula, I urge you—”

“Save it, Uncle.”

The bedroom door swung open.

“Neither of you come in. This little meeting is for me and my brother alone.”

Impeccable red lips, the swooping edges of her armor. She was smaller than Zuko remembered, which was typical these days; the whole world felt like something he could crush in one hand. All his memories now were distorted by the way he mapped the world now, in his enormous crippled body.

Azula’s eyes widened as she turned to face the bed. Then she started laughing.

“ _Zuzu_.”

She sat beside him, her sharp manicured nails tracing the sides of his face.

“So the rumors are true,” she mused.

“What are the rumors?” Zuko demanded, finding his voice.

She threw the sheets back and, briefly, lost her composure. There was something like fear in her face before it was taken over by a demented grin.

“My God,” she said. “Zhao ruined you.”

It was instinct to argue with Azula, but he couldn’t speak. She wasn’t wrong.

Her eyes ran over his body: his heavy breasts, his straining belly, the fresh stretch marks ripping up his sides.

“You’ve really lost control, haven’t you?” Curiously, she touched the flesh under his chin.Her nails were freezing cold.

“Get away from me.”

“I feel sorry for you. Really, Zuzu, I do.”

His face burned. He pushed her hand back.

“Liar. You never feel anything for anyone.”

“You’ve never trusted me.” Azula examined her nails. “Everyone knows what Zhao does to his captives.”

“He—what? I didn’t know!”

“You’ve never been known for your powers of awareness, Zuzu. Always drifting around in your own little world, moping down the halls… Father used to wonder if you were retarded. We thought something was wrong with you.” She laughed. “Of course, we don’thave to speculate anymore.”

She was studying his body again. He thought he might die.

“Still,” she continued. “Zhao isn’t known for doing this in particular. He must really have _liked_ you. Special boy.”

“Stop it, Azula,” he hissed. “What did he do to the others?”

“He raped them, of course.”

The color left Zuko’s face. “Everybody knew—”

“I do feel sorry for you, Zuzu,” she said again, with a note in her voice like she was bemused by the fact that she cared at all. She touched his chin. “You were always very beautiful. I remember thinking that when we were little. We both were. But there’s something about being beautiful that makes people try to hurt you.”

“Did someone hurt you?”

“I said _try_ , Zuzu,” she snapped, flinging the blanket back over him. “You’ve got to have a thicker skin. There has to be a layer between yourself and the world. I had it, you didn’t. You never did. You always walked around completely open. You were practically inviting it.” She traced the edges of his scar. “Why do you think Father hurt you?”

He had his old answers to this question, which he had asked himself almost constantly since the day it happened. He didn’t have any interest in sharing them with Azula.

“I was a little relieved, frankly,” she continued. “I hadn’t realized how much I had been holding my breath, waiting for it to happen.”

“Thanks for the pep talk.”

Azula’s nails dug into the side of his face, and he sucked in his breath.

“If you had any sense at all, you _would_ recognize this as a pep talk. You would thank me and you would mean it.” She released her grip. “I’ve always told you you were weak, but apparently that wasn’t enough of a hint for you. If you’d listen, if you’d exercise your mind for even a moment, you’d understand that I’m trying to tell you the _ways_ in which you’re weak. You’re just like Mother.”

She sighed.

“Zuko, look at yourself. You’re a gaping hole.”

He was stunned. How did she know what it felt like?

“You’re a fucking hole, and until you understand what you need, you’re going to keep trying to fill that hole with garbage.” She waved her hand. “And everyone outside that door is so busy being _nice_ , stepping around the edges of the hole, that they aren’t letting you look at yourself. Look at yourself! You’re—you’re like a bag of fat. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. You’re disgusting. I bet you spend all day sitting around wishing Zhao would fuck you again just so you knew what to do with yourself.”

“Why are you doing this?” Zuko’s voice cracked, tears stinging his face.

“Because you’re an _embarrassment_ ,” she hissed.

“Azula—”

“Do you know what it’s like for me and Father, hearing the rumors and gossip flow into the palace? His son is a whore, his son is an enormous hermit hiding out in a little Earth Kingdom hut, his son vomits himself to sleep, he can’t wipe himself…”

“That’s not—”

“Enough! My God. He sent me out here to end you and I don’t even have the heart to do it, you’d be so disgusting dead.”

She stood up, wiping her hands on her trousers. “Just try to be slightly less of an embarrassment.”

He sat in the dark for a long time after she left. Muffled arguments from the front of the house, a teacup shattering, the front door slamming shut. Song came running into the room.

“Zuko!”

With an almost clinical curiosity he watched how easily she moved. She leapt onto the bed in a single tidy movement and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his neck.

“Zuko, are you all right?”

“I’m tired of being lied to,” he said quietly. “Why did you tell me I was beautiful?”

She looked up at him. His eyes were dull.

“I don’t lie to you,” she said. She kissed his collarbone, feeling him stiffen under her touch.

Iroh came running after her. “Nephew, are you okay?”

“I don’t want you to lie to me anymore,” Zuko said, his voice breaking. “Either of you. I’m a fucking monster and I need to be controlled.”

“You know you can’t listen to Azula. She distorts—”

“She’s more honest than any of you!” Zuko yelled. Song reached for his face and he grabbed her wrist, wrenching it down, his nails digging into her skin, seeking bone. She cried out and he didn’t care. He couldn’t feel anything at all.

Iroh smacked his hand off, pulling Song to her feet.

“Don’t you _dare_ treat a woman that way,” he warned. “She’s been nothing but kind to you and this is how you repay her?”

“I told you I was a monster and you wouldn’t listen,” Zuko rasped. “I don’t know how to make you listen! It’s like none of you see me. You look at me and you see something that isn’t there.”

“Zuko—”

“I’m gone, okay? I’ve been gone for a long time now. And you’re not going to bring me back by telling me how beautiful and precious I am.”

“But you are,” Song said softly.

Zuko looked at them. She was so small and fragile, her white hands shaking at the ends of her green robe, Iroh’s hands firm on her shoulders. He looked furiously sad. Zuko thought about what Azula had said, about he way he had been when they were young. How there was something appealing and gentle about him. It had always made people want to hurt him.

“You have to understand what I’m trying to tell you,” Zuko said, his voice tired. “Look. _Look at me_. I’ve been stuck here for a long time. I’m not getting any better. I’m getting worse. Azula is a liar but that doesn’t mean she always lies.

“We have to try something different,” he said. “I think you both have this fantasy of the old Zuko being trapped somewhere inside me, but that person is gone. You don’t understand what I’ve been through, and that’s my fault because I never talk about it, because I am _so ashamed._ I’ve been through hell and my thoughts are so dark now.”

“Zuko,” Song pleaded. She looked so crushable. He had to made her understand.

“In my dreams I destroy you both,” Zuko said.


	9. It isn't your affair!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is life! Hope you guys are enjoying it

“Tell me what the old warriors did.”

They were out in the garden, under the sun. The late spring sun had touched all the leaves with silver. Zuko could smell the earth waking up.

Iroh looked at his nephew quizzically.

“I know you studied them,” Zuko said. “You probably studied _with_ them.”

He nodded.

“What is it you want to know, nephew? I’ve told you much of their teachings already.”

“How did they…” He hesitated. “Test their strength?”

“Ah,” Iroh said. “You want to know if they fasted.”

Zuko’s face was burning again. He hated talking about food. He hated talking about not having food. He didn’t have the vocabulary for the shame that opened up in him. There was an old fear left over from legends and the petty gossip of children, certainty that if you said the name of spirits they would come for you.

“The Sun Warriors would go on journeys during the summer solstice,” Iroh said. “For days, often more than a week. During that time, they would abstain from food and water, to purify their bodies. They became pure energy.”

“That’s what I learned,” Zuko blurted out. “There’s hunger in everything. I can feel it everywhere now, in roots and leaves and in light, in everything.”

Iroh looked sad and hesitant, like he wanted to reach for Zuko’s hand but was afraid to try touching him again. Since the day of Azula’s visit, he had refused all touch. He spent much of his time in his room, meditating, trying to turn slow circles around the bed, reading old texts. He didn’t let Song enter. He had retreated into a kind of asceticism, refusing all pleasure. He was terribly white. His face looked emptied out.

“There is hunger in everything,” Iroh said, “but there is also the capacity to nourish the hunger. These forces working together are _energy_. What you are feeling is only one half of a relationship. Push and pull, shadow and light. Balance.”

“Balance,” Zuko repeated, sounding lost.

“Fire, in its true form, is not hunger. It is energy. Everything that lives has the capacity to sustain itself.”

Zuko looked at his hands. He was holding his knees tightly.

“Are you sure it’s everything?”

“Oh Zuko.” Iroh knelt in front of his nephew, covering his hands with his. They felt so cold. “I hate to see you like this.”

Zuko’s face darkened. “Fat.”

“Frightened!” Iroh said. “Confused! There is so much despair in your voice. If I could I would take it from you.”

“I think Zhao took me out of the cycle,” Zuko said slowly. “Out of balance.”

“When the Sun Warriors fasted, they sustained themselves on pure energy. Do you understand? They didn’t fear hunger because they understand that they had the capacity to sustain themselves. And they understood that at the end of the journey, there would be nourishment again.”

“I don’t know if there will be.”

Iroh squeezed his hands.

“I don’t think that Zhao took you out of the cycle. I think he took away your trust. You don’t trust that the hunger will end.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Zuko said, exasperated. “How can I trust if trust is what brought me here? Trust makes you vulnerable. It makes you weak.”

Iroh was quiet for some time. He got to his feet and sat beside his nephew on the bench. He could feel how rigid Zuko was, reluctant to have anyone near him, to let anyone in.

“At the Siege of the North,” Zuko said, “I saved Zhao’s life. I don’t think I told you this.”

“You did not.”

“A wave was going to take him. I reached out my hand and he took it.” Zuko’s eyes were hard. “And that was a mistake.”

“You saved a man’s life.”

“I think he never forgave me for it. That’s why he hunted me down at the port. I humiliated him. He had to humiliate me.”

The feeding, the dependence, the way Zhao made him grow but also grow into him, the way a tree grows into its neighbor—leaning, sending out roots—but parasitic. The fucking, the needing, the way he made Zuko hard and then took his hand away and left him curled up on the floor with pain and wanting.

Zuko was on the bench again, morning light on his neck, fists balled.

“That’s what I’m saying about trust,” he said.

“Have you spoken to Song?”

Zuko startled.

“What? No! Why are you asking me?”

“We’re talking about trust,” Iroh said. “She cares about you very much.”

Zuko didn’t say anything. The anger was building up again.

“You asked me to be honest with you,” Iroh said. “And I have always been honest with you, although I have also tried to be kind. A lesson Azula never seemed to learn.” He paused. “But Zuko, I must tell you. In the way you treat Song, I can see more of my brother in you than I’ve ever seen. That worries me.”

“Don’t worry,” Zuko said stiffly.

“There is a dynamic here that is unhealthy. She cares about you and you respond by hurting her. You bruised her wrist.”

“It isn’t your affair, Uncle!”

Zuko got to his feet, fists clenched so tightly that his nails dug into the heels of his hands.

“She needs to know who she’s dealing with,” he hissed. “She’s dealing with someone who will hurt her.”

“I must disagree,” Iroh said, his eyes narrowing. “That is entirely within your control.”

Zuko laughed bitterly. “ _Nothing_ is within my control.”

“Think about your mother.”

“Don’t talk about my mother!”

“Then think about discipline,” Iroh said, “and trust. You asked me how you can trust if trust makes you vulnerable and weak. I must be honest with you. Trust can make you vulnerable. But consider the kind of weakness that comes from an absence of trust. Fear, paranoia, hunger. A brittle sense of self.”

Iroh rose, brushing stray leaves from his robes.

“I would suggest that you weigh the two against each other, and think about the sort of person you want to be.”

After Iroh had gone, Zuko remained in the garden, still standing, still clenched, his nails beginning to draw blood. He decided to test himself, to see how long he could keep going this way. Watching the blood well on his palms, he thought about what anger might look like in the body. What energy looked like.

His uncle had asked what sort of person he wanted to be. But what if he didn’t want to be anything at all?


	10. I want to take care of you, but I’m really fucking bad at it

There was surprise in Song’s face when he came in the room. It was dark, the candles in back barely flickering, but Zuko thought he saw fear there, in her face and in the way she held herself. She was sitting cross-legged with a book in her lap.

“How can you read?”

“I’m literate,” Song said warily.

“No, I mean—gah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s so dark in here. I can barely see.”

Zuko gestured toward the wall and the candles flared, the flames stretching several inches high. Song stiffened. Yes, she was definitely afraid of him.

“I’m keep messing this up,” Zuko said. “I’m sorry. I can go if you want me to go.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

There was fear in her expression but also a kind of hunger. He didn’t know how to describe it.

“Sit,” she said quietly. She closed her book and moved it to the nightstand.

He sat next to her, a burning distance between them he was afraid to cross.

“What were you reading?”

“It’s an old book,” she said. “Herbal remedies. I got it from my father. Before he left for the war.”

“I remember,” Zuko said. “I remember you telling us that he had gone.”

“He taught me everything I know,” Song said, studying her hands. “He was a waterbender.”

“How did he end up in the Earth Kingdom?”

“I was young when he left. I don’t really know. He didn’t talk about it.” She looked away. “I have my suspicions.”

“The Fire Nation,” Zuko said flatly.

“Yes. That’s what I think happened.”

Tentatively he reached for her hand. She let him. Zuko kept thinking about how small it was. It pained him to think about what he had done to her wrist. It had been more than two weeks since Azula’s visit and she was fully healed, but when Zuko looked at her he saw the shadow of that bruise flicker on her skin, like the blot that follows you after you stare into the sun.

“I told you the Fire Nation took my father,” Song said. “And you told me the Fire Nation took your mother. Was that true?”

He nodded.

“I don’t know what my father did to her. I never saw her again.”

“Did he—hurt her?”

“I was little,” Zuko said. “I don’t know if I would have recognized it if I saw it.” He paused. “I mean, he hurt _me_.”

“Was that—”

Her hand drifted to his face, to the scar. His sense of touch was muffled there, but he felt the warmth where her hand brushed the edges, the skin that was still whole. He closed his eyes. Usually when someone touched his scar he felt shame, or anger. Tonight he felt peaceful. It was just a reminder of one place where he couldn’t be hurt again.

“I showed you my leg,” Song said.

“Yes.”

“What did you think when you saw me?” she asked, anxiety in her voice. “I showed you my leg and then I touched your face and when you drew back, I thought—I don’t know. I thought you were disgusted.”

“Not with you,” Zuko said.

He leaned into her hand and kissed it.

“You were so thin,” Song whispered. “I mean, when you brought your uncle to the clinic, I knew we had to treat his rash, but if he hadn’t been there, I would have assumed—I thought you were dying. Where your shirt opened, I could see the bones in your chest.”

Zuko was quiet.

“That’s not a problem now, obviously,” he said.

“Please don’t be angry,” Song said.

He had lost weight since Azula’s visit. He had barely eaten anything. If he tried to think back, the weeks were a blur. Had he eaten at all? He remembered drinking water. He remembered pacing in his room, trying to walk without the stick. And yes, he remembered being fucking _angry_ , wounded, like he was navigating the world without any skin. As he grew empty, that rage ran out of fuel. But he could trace the fire in everything.

“You look good,” Song was saying. “You look lighter, like you’re moving easily.” She hesitated. “Your face is the way it was before, though. Like you’re starving.”

“I am.”

Zuko kissed her, pushing deep into her throat. She made a startled noise—his mouth was freezing cold—and then pushed back, easing into him, and when he touched her waist she moaned. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been so warm, so buried in real heat, and saliva rushed to his mouth, like he would consume her.

He lost his breath. He broke away, trying to get it back.

“Zuko?”

“Hold on,” he wheezed.

She rubbed his back slowly, feeling the rhythm of his lungs. His heart was galloping, and when she pressed her ear to his back she could feel the way it shook him every time it beat.

“Oh God, Song. I’m such a mess.”

She didn’t know what to say. He was looking better, but he was right, and she was terrified. She squeezed his shoulder tightly.

“When we came to the clinic,” he said in short gasps, “we had been on a raft, in the ocean, in the north. Paddling. For months.” He remembered the paradox of those days: how bitterly cold the air was, how the white sun never seemed to warm him but left their faces and backs burned. His skin came away in bubbling strips, and when the saltwater touched his body, or even the salty air, he thought someone was lighting him on fire. He was dazed by the pain, dazed by the sun on the water.

“We had nothing,” he said, and his anger at the memory propelled him through. “There were huge fish trying to eat us. The smaller fish we tried to catch. We boiled the salt out of the water and it took forever. There was never enough of anything. For months. My skin fell off and I thought when they found me I would be nothing. A skeleton.”

Song wrapped herself around his back, rubbing his arms.

“Sometimes I think, if it hadn’t been for the raft, this wouldn’t have happened to me. I was so afraid of being that hungry again.” Zuko covered his face and screamed into his hands. “And it didn’t even matter! I’m still so fucking hungry!”

He could feel Song’s heartbeat jump against his back, the way she began to pull back, and he couldn’t control himself. He screamed again into his hands, muffled, muzzled.

“You said I wasn’t being honest with you before,” Song said slowly. “When I told you how beautiful you are.”

“What was I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. “I wanted you at my mother’s house, when you were too thin, and so angry. And I wanted you when I saw you again, when you were so hurt.”

“When I was so disgusting.”

She shook her head. “You weren’t disgusting. Zuko, you were _hurt_. He had hurt you. We were so afraid we were going to lose you.” She was starting to cry. “It’s ridiculous. I didn’t even know you, and probably I still don’t know you, but I just want you. I want you all the time, and you’re beautiful to me. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Song, I—”

She scrubbed her tears back angrily.

“Don’t _ever_ say that to me again,” she said. “Don’t accuse me. Don’t—don’t twist my wrists, don’t throw me into walls. I didn’t think I’d have to spell that out for you, but maybe I do.”

“I want to take care of you,” Zuko said.

He took her hand, kissed her knuckles. He kissed her wrist.

“But I’m really fucking bad at it,” he said.

“I feel like an idiot,” Song said, “because I want to be with someone who tells me I lie and keeps trying to hurt me. If my mother could see me now, I don’t think I could look her in the eyes.”

Zuko made a sound like he had been stabbed. He dropped her hand and buried his face again.

“I didn’t want to see you because I was angry at you for no reason,” he mumbled, “and I didn’t—I don’t—want to hurt you.”

When he lifted his head there was blood smeared on his chin, where he had bitten through his lip trying to control himself.

“I want you to leave me if I ever treat you like that. Or I’ll leave. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it.” Tears ran down his face. “I’m so sorry.”

Song didn’t say anything. Zuko felt her hands at the back of his head, untying his ponytail, carding her fingers through his hair. He didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean. He thought he should leave, and he would leave, sleeping alone in his room again with the door tightly fastened, but for now he closed his eyes and tried to remember the last time someone had touched his hair like he was precious.


	11. What is the Avatar to you now?

In the mornings he went for walks with his uncle along the coast. The coastline was deserted—the little island was, as his uncle kept assuring him, entirely uninhabited, despite the rumors that seemed to have reached his father so easily—but Zuko felt safest in the dark. They would start off hours before the sun came up, winding along the coast and up a gentle incline to the highest point on the island.

Mostly they said nothing. Iroh hummed to himself, snatches of folk songs that Zuko thought he recognized, and politely ignored the way his nephew struggled forward, leaning heavily on his staff. It was always easy at first, but before the first hour had passed he could feel the sweat gathering uncomfortably under his robes. The pain started in his legs and feet; increasingly he was lopsided, and quick to lose his balance. He must have lost eighty pounds since Azula’s visit. His body changed every day, and he didn’t trust that he knew where to place his weight.

The first week of their new routine, Zuko had paused often to vomit, or retch, if nothing came up. Sometimes he felt like he was poisoned. His uncle had asked him anxiously if he was sure he wanted to keep going, and Zuko told him as much, that this was poison he had to work out of his system.

“I’m not sure that’s how this kind of thing works, Zuko.”

“I don’t really care,” Zuko mumbled. He heaved into the sand, seagulls scattering in alarm.

Gradually the vomiting stopped, less because he was growing stronger than because he had stopped eating almost entirely. When he stopped on their walks, it was because the landscape had started to sweep around him, or dissolve, and sometimes he stopped because he couldn’t remember what he was doing.

Iroh tried to remain silent, knowing it was what his nephew wanted, but one morning, as they started their ascent into the brush, the pain in Zuko’s face was so great that he looked like he was twisting up from the inside, and Iroh’s heart hurt too much to keep going.

“Zuko, let’s sit for a while.”

“I don’t want to.” He waved his arm vaguely in front of him, like he was pushing off a swarm of flies. “I’m fine, I told you I’m fine.”

“I want to sit because I’m a tired old man,” Iroh said.

They cleared off dead leaves and settled down, leaning against the trees. Zuko was red, glazed with sweat, and his eyes looked dull, less gold than sickly brown. He was thin enough now to wear his uncle’s clothes, and when Iroh looked at him he had the peculiar sense that he was sitting with his younger self. Or—his heart stung—with Lu Ten.

“Do you feel the energy in the leaves?”

Zuko grunted. It wasn’t really assent or acknowledgment. It reminded Iroh of what communication with his nephew had been like on their journey for the Avatar, as the years progressed and there were weeks when he didn’t want to get up in the morning. He would bring Zuko a bowl of broth and sit with him, chatting pleasantly. Zuko usually rolled over and faced the wall.

“I must admit,” Iroh said, “I have never fasted as long as you have fasted, and I cannot say whether the Sun Warriors ever did. But I suspect that they drew energy from the natural world as well as from themselves. Otherwise, they might have consumed themselves.”

That was the word. _Consumed_. Zuko looked consumed. The bones were standing out in his cheeks, his skin the color of clenched knuckles. When Iroh made tea for them before they set off, his nephew would wrap his hands around the cup, bending down to take in the steam like there was no heat left in his own body at all. He hadn’t been able to firebend in weeks.

“So if you can feel the energy in the leaves,” Iroh continued, “draw from them. There is a vein of energy through everything.”

Zuko nodded painfully, closing his eyes and breathing in through his nose. They sat quietly together for some time.

“I can feel it,” he rasped. “But I can’t access it.”

“Nephew…” Iroh trailed off, looking at Zuko’s pinched, disappointed face and feeling his heart break. “Can I…?”

Zuko hesitated, then nodded sharply. Iroh’s arms swallowed him up, his hands pressing his nephew’s head against his chest. Zuko felt a hum of warmth spreading through him.

“Please don’t be hard on yourself,” his uncle murmured.

“I just want to be strong again,” Zuko mumbled. “I mean, I think I do. I don’t know. Most of the time I don’t care about anything.”

“I think you need something to work toward again.”

“I’ll find the Avatar.”

“Nephew, I don’t think that would be productive. What is the Avatar to you now?”

“I don’t know,” Zuko said. “But—”

“You reach for the Avatar because it is familiar,” Iroh said, a little exasperated but hiding his impatience. “Don’t choose what you want out of familiarity. _Think_ , nephew. What do you want?”

“I want to kill Zhao.”


	12. Water goes where there’s a channel

His uncle was silent, but he squeezed Zuko tightly.

“I don’t think you should encourage that part of yourself,” Iroh said finally.

Zuko buried his face in his uncle’s chest, hot tears soaking through the robes.

“Did my father hurt my mother?”

Iroh knew what he was asking, and why. He had seen the way Song rushed to his nephew as he hobbled to the door, the way Zuko’s face lit up with love and hesitation when she touched him. In the afternoons, when they meditated together, there were moments when the candles abruptly surged and Zuko’s breath staggered, like he was having a nightmare in the middle of the day.

“What do you remember?” Iroh said cautiously.

“I don’t. I have dreams…” His breathing was ragged. He trailed off, shaking a little, and Iroh turned his nephew’s face towards him, thumbing the tears from the corners of his eyes.

“Do you think these dreams are memories?” Iroh prodded, his voice gentle.

Zuko shook his head fiercely.

“No, I—I’m the one who—” He breathed in, then let the air out in a slow hiss. “In the dreams it’s me. It’s not my father. And I’m hurting her.”

“Are you firebending?”

“No. I’m twisting her wrists. And I break her hands.” Zuko choked. “And I do things—”

“Breathe, Zuko.”

“I do some of the things Zhao did to me.”

Iroh rubbed slow circles into his nephew’s back.

“I don’t know what Ozai did to your mother. I know he was not good to her. But I never saw her with broken skin or bruises.” Iroh paused. “Of course, as you know, not all wounds are visible.”

“What did he even want with her?” Zuko blurted out. “Why did he marry her if he didn’t even like her?”

“He had certain… duties. It was in some ways a marriage of political convenience.”

“Was it _convenient_ to him, then? Hurting her?”

“Zuko, this may be hard for you to hear, but I think Ozai did like her.”

Zuko snorted.

“Listen to me. Your mother had many good qualities. And she was a very attractive woman. She was beautiful, and loyal, and highly determined. She was very much like you.” He smiled at Zuko sadly.

“Uncle, what are you saying?”

“I think that Ozai did like her,” Iroh said again. “But I think he also liked hurting her.”

It took a while for his words to sink in. Zuko stood up and started pacing, running his fingers through his hair.

“So I’m like him, then,” he said, his tone almost accusatory.

“Do you like hurting Song?”

“No,” Zuko said immediately. “I mean, I don’t—I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. It’s like it’s _easy_. Does that make sense? Not that it should make sense. It—it just comes easily. The violence, I guess.”

“Water flows most readily where there is already a channel.”

“Where there’s a channel,” Zuko repeated. His eyes narrowed abruptly and he threw his arm to one side, setting the tree in front of him ablaze. 

Iroh dismissed the fire with a wave of his hand.

“I suggest we keep walking,” he said. “It looks like you have a little energy to work out.”

The path wound up through scrub, woody plants dotted with yellow flowers. Zuko stamped too loudly, first out of mindless rage and then gradually, as he realized what he doing, with an effort at deliberate malice, kicking up plants with the toe of his boot. Iroh said nothing.

Eventually Zuko lost heart. And he was tired.

“Uncle,” he said. “What was my father like when he was my age?”

“Cruel,” Iroh said simply. “He was very handsome, very talented, and very cruel. It took me years to understand that he wasn’t going to change.”

“I feel like I change all the time,” Zuko said.

“You remember what I told you. You’re like your mother. You take after her in your kindness, and in your appreciation for the natural world.” Iroh paused awkwardly as he looked at the trail of devastation his nephew had left behind him.

Zuko flushed.

“Well, mostly,” Iroh concluded.

“I wish I was more like her.”

“Balance, nephew. Balance. I say this to you all the time. Your father is cruel, but extremely talented. He is a methodical thinker. He is nearly always angry. Also, he has a drinking problem.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“People don’t talk about it.”

Iroh looked up at the clouds scudding across the sky, beyond the cypress trees. He used to come home from a military campaign and find Ozai sprawled in the royal baths, vomiting. Or Ozai would come with them on the campaign and drink heavily around the fire, sake spilling down his robes. After a few weeks of this, no one would sit with him when he was drunk. The men were frightened of his temper but also embarrassed; who would willingly watch a member of the royal family drink himself into a stupor? It didn’t take long before Azulon called his son back to the palace, leaving Iroh to advance toward Ba Sing Se alone.

Ozai had never forgiven Iroh for that. For going forward when Ozai could not, but most of all for seeing Ozai so vulnerable.

“As far as your mother goes,” Iroh went on, “Ursa was, as I’ve told you, kind and determined, with a great sense of obligation and justice. That sometimes led her to unfortunate decisions. She would decide on something out of kindness, and be unwilling to change her course even when the consequences were disastrous.”

The night of the wedding, Iroh found Ursa in a secluded corner of the palace gardens, sitting quietly beside the shadowed pond and weeping. Ozai had told her she could never see or speak to her family again, now that she was a member of the royal family. Iroh had a distinct memory of looking at Ursa and wishing he could tell her to run while she still could. Instead he told her to follow her heart and her conscience. He could not make so consequential a decision for her.

“You have the potential to be like either of your parents, Zuko. It has always been my hope that you would choose their best qualities. I recognize that it does not always feel like a matter of choice.”

“You said it was a matter of political convenience,” Zuko said. “Their marriage.”

“I don’t suppose that anyone ever told you.” Iroh paused, considering his words carefully. “Ursa was descended from Avatar Roku. His blood runs in your veins.”

Zuko stopped where he was. As he looked at his uncle, Iroh saw no comprehension in his face at all.

“My father wished to reinvigorate our bloodline with the blood of the Avatar. He sent scouts across the four corners of the world. In the end, he found Roku’s descendants living in a small village on the outskirts of the Fire Nation. And he found they possessed a beautiful daughter of marriageable age.”

“Avatar Roku,” Zuko repeated, the name rolling in his mouth. “I didn’t know he had children.”

“Well, they aren’t all monks,” Iroh said cheerfully.

“Wait. You were the crown prince. Why didn’t Grandfather want Ursa to marry you?”

“By that time I had met your aunt.”

Zuko had never met Kimiko. She died giving birth to Lu Ten before Zuko was even born. The first time he had ever seen her face was on the Wani. Sometimes during the evening, his uncle sat on the deck with a scroll smoothed against his lap, studying it. It took Zuko a while to realize that it was an ink portrait of his wife.

“One of the great regrets of my life, nephew, is that I wasn’t around much during your childhood.”

What Iroh did not say is that the one of the other great regrets, if regret was the right word, was the accident of his timing in courting Kimiko. He had loved her deeply, but he had thought obsessively for years, particularly in the empty years after her death, about what might have happened if he had met Ursa first—how he might have spared her being married to Ozai. It took him a long time to accept that if Ursa hadn’t married Ozai, someone else would have. And someone else’s children would have grown up like Zuko and Azula. He probably would have ended up in exile on some other island, trying to save some other broken nephew from the legacy of his hurt.

“You didn’t have a choice,” Zuko said. “You were taking Ba Sing Se.”

They trudged upwards through a patch of white lavender, the petals clinging to their robes as they broke through to the summit.

“I regret Ba Sing Se too,” Iroh said.


	13. Look at that smile/You don’t have to punish yourself because someone punished you

“You smell like honeysuckle.”

Zuko was sitting with Song on her bed, studying a scroll on firebending technique, and Song was sniffing his hair.

“Really?”

Song grinned at him. “Look at that smile,” she said.

He was smiling, a little. She must have seen him smile at some point, she knew that, but when she thought back, she couldn’t think of when that must have been, or what had triggered it. But look at this sweet, tired smile. Song thought she had never seen anything so delicious in her life. She took his face in her hands.

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re so goddamn gorgeous.”

Zuko flushed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Do you really—”

She leaned in, kissing slowly along every inch of his mouth until he made a pained, half-smothered noise.

“Gorgeous.”

His cock swelled against her leg and she smiled, running her fingers through his hair.

“Will you let me see you?”

“I—I don’t know if that’s—”

They hadn’t slept together since their last attempt, before Azula’s visit, when he thought his heart would give out. Every time he thought of it, Zuko wanted her, but he was also consumed every time by an intense burning up his face and neck, flashing back to the shame of it: heaving, gasping, terrified he would crush her or turn on her, or that time would slip away from him, as it sometimes did, and he would be back in the ship, pinned against the metal floor by Zhao, but also by his own body, his weakness, his insufficiency. That was the largest he had been since Zhao, maybe the largest he had been even counting Zhao, and when he thought about sex, in his mind Zuko occupied the same body he had occupied then.

He had been so heavy it felt like grief.

“I just want to see you,” Song was saying. “We don’t have to do anything.”

Sometimes they shared the same bed, although Zuko slept fully clothed. The first time he had fallen asleep in Song’s bed it was the middle of the afternoon. They were studying together, sitting cross-legged on opposite sides of the bed, Zuko with a book on meditation and Song with her book of herbs, thumbing through a subsection on obscure remedies for conditions he didn’t even know needed treating. He was exhausted. When he woke up she was nestled against his back, one arm reaching over his belly. He tensed, not knowing where he was, before he felt for his clothes and understood again, and she kissed the knotted muscles in his back.

Now that Zuko could dress himself again he clung to his clothing like a security blanket. It was his protection against the world, protection against self-knowledge, which meant ever having to look at himself in a mirror; he dressed quickly, in the dark, often with closed eyes. He tried to do it when Song was asleep, or when he was alone in his room.

She squeezed his hand.

“You don’t have to.”

Zuko turned his back to her and stared at the wall. He started to work his arms free of his tunic, slipping it over his head. This was the part where he meant to turn around, but he found himself paralyzed, his heart shaking his whole body. Song wrapped her legs around his smooth bare back, arms knotting around his chest. “You feel so good,” she murmured in his ear. He flushed again. “I’m happy just holding you.”

“Do you—do you want to lay down?” he asked quietly.

“If you want to.”

“Can you help me?”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“I just—it’s hard to move because I’m afraid.” The words came out in a shallow rush and then he sat there wondering how inhaling worked, like it was a scientific curiosity he had never considered in practice.

Warm hands on his shoulders, helping his head to the pillow. Song was looking at him and her face was overwhelmed.

“Oh God, Zuko.”

She traced the contours of his breasts, the small pillow of fat at his belly. He had about thirty pounds left to lose, most of it gathered in his stomach and thighs, but she touched all of him like he was precious.

“Look at this gorgeous man,” she mumbled, her voice a little slurred with wanting. She ran her hands over the new muscles forming in his shoulders. She bent down and kissed his soft nipples, the yielding shape of his belly, then pulled his trousers down gently, just enough to kiss his hip-bones in turn.

“Song.”

“I know, I know.” She kissed his belly again and pulled his trousers back up. “I just want you to know how gorgeous you are. You’re obscenely gorgeous, Zuko.”

Zuko’s face was bright red, pleased and a little panicked. He brushed his knuckles against her cheek, his eyes full of emotion, his words smothered somewhere in his chest.

“You’re doing so well,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He tried to think of how to express what it felt like, but was swamped with a thousand feelings he didn’t have the vocabulary for. He closed himself off.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

How did he feel? He felt bone-tired. It wasn’t the same as the fatigue he felt from being heavy, the exertion of dragging a freshly doubled body around, or just trying to get it to roll over, but the hunger had become like a chronic pain, an old injury that lived under his skin and threaded through every muscle. When he trained with Uncle, he operated with half his strength, waving his arms around without any force. He was light again, but when he moved he felt untethered.

On the other hand, he was usually so exhausted that his thoughts couldn’t consume him. Was that an improvement?

He reached up and interlaced his fingers with hers, running his thumb over her knuckles.

“I used to feel like I was always dying,” he said. “And now I always feel like I’m dead.”

Song kissed his thumb, then opened his hand and kissed the palm.

“Tell me when you’re ready,” she said.

That was the code they used now, to prepare Zuko for something he didn’t want to hear. He breathed in deeply and exhaled three times, thinking about the small, controlled flame of a candle. Don’t hurt anyone, he instructed himself. Don’t do it.

“Ready,” he said.

“I know about what you’ve been doing, Zuko. With the herbs.”

He froze.

“I noticed you’d been reading the book,” Song said. “I didn’t really think anything of it.”

“I was curious,” he said weakly.

“Then Iroh told me about what happens on your walks, when you exert yourself. He was worried, obviously. He thought something was wrong with your heart.” Song frowned, rubbing his chest in a small good-luck ritual, like the gesture might be enough to keep his heart safe. “And then I saw the way you vanish after meals.”

“Song,” he said.

“False lavender,” she said, “isn’t something to be used casually. In women it triggers miscarriages. I don’t know what it does to men.”

“I found it under Purges,” he said quietly.

“I know you’re scared, but I think you need to stop.”

Part of him thrilled at the words, the idea of _stop_. He was tired of gathering the white flowers in secret, tired of chopping them finely with the blade his uncle had given him as child— _never give up_ , he thought bitterly—and boiling them, the rancid-sweet smell like a fruit that had left been rotting in the field. Tired of being tired, tired of swooning when he tried to climb a sloping hill, overwhelming brightness every time he went out into the sun. It was like being sick and like being drunk, an awful compromise between the two. Vomiting into a bowl, fire at the back of his throat, the kind of fire that uses you as kindling and leaves you reduced to ash.

Of course, the other half of him was terrified.

“Look how far you’ve come. You don’t need the herbs anymore.”

“What if it comes back?” he whispered.

“You’re going to be okay,” Song said, not meeting his eyes, not answering the question.

“But nothing bad’s happened so far.”

“Well, let’s see, Zuko,” she said flatly. “You can’t keep any food down and you feel like you’re dead.”

“Other than that.”

“You’re going to destroy your teeth. If you keep it up you’re going to destroy your heart. _Think this through_. If you stop taking the herbs, you _might_ lose weight more slowly. If you keep taking them, you will _absolutely_ wipe out your heart.”

“But you can heal it again,” Zuko suggested.

Song got up. She turned away from him, staring at the window with arms crossed.

“Are you—”

“Don’t,” she said. “I need a minute.”

Zuko closed his eyes.

“Do you know the hell I wen through, trying to save your heart?” she said slowly, to the window. “Do you know what it was like, seeing you like that? It looked like you were having a seizure. Or like someone was bending your blood. Meanwhile I’m panicking, having never tried to treat a heart before, let alone a heart attack, wondering if I’m good enough or even quick enough to stop you from dying, completely frantic that I’m already too late and you might be dead or brain-dead.” Song turned back to face him, livid. “ _That’s_ what it’s like, healing your heart.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“To hear you say, so casually, that I can just _do it again_ —”

“I was afraid,” Zuko whispered.

“To do that to your uncle—”

“Please, Song.”

“After all the loss he’s been though—”

“I was afraid,” he said, starting to cry. “I was afraid, I was afraid.”

“Are you that vain?”

“No! I don’t care what I look like.” He paused. “Or I didn’t think I did. I don’t know.”

“It’s your family, isn’t it?” Song said, with a softer voice.

Elegant, lethal Azula, her body as intense and compact as her blue fire. His father, his body eaten up by so much muscle it might have been brutish, but subsumed by a panther-like grace. He remembered being a child, watching from a window in the early mornings as his father practiced in the courtyard, throwing off long arcs of fire with a sweep of his feet, dissolving them with blocked fists. They were both so controlled. They had control over everything. And they would rather see him dead than undisciplined.

“I don’t know if I’m vain,” Zuko said. “I just—I want to feel pure. I want to get _this_ off of me.” He waved vaguely at his whole body. “It’s like having what he did to me physically with me every day. Like a leech. It’s like if your worst memories were a part of your body.”

Song pulled up her pants leg, flashing her scars.

“I think we both already know what that’s like, Zuko. And I think we came to grips with it a long time ago.”

Zuko pulled a pillow over his face.

“You don’t get to choose what your body remembers.”

“I don’t want to fight,” Zuko said.

“You don’t have to punish yourself because someone punished you,” Song said. “You are who you are. Do you remember what you told us? The old Zuko is gone. That’s what you said. If you believe that, why are you willing to kill yourself to prove he isn’t?”

Zuko lay there with the pillow over his face.

Water goes where there’s a channel, he thought.


	14. To show you who I am

“Nephew, I think we have reached an end to the progress you have made at this house.”

Zuko looked up at his uncle. They were sitting in the garden after a sparring match, the summer heat seething up from the ground. He was bare-chested, uncomfortable about it, but the sun on his skin was like heaven. White feet rooted in the ground, breath rooted in his chest, a single column of heat traveling through his body—he became emotional at times, moving through the stances. The sun took control of his body and he was _free_.

“I think it would be beneficial to you if we trained at a different location,” Iroh continued. “I was thinking we might go to the mountains of the Southern Air Temple, or perhaps to the desert. There is a little tea shop on the outskirts that is simply delightful.”

“I’ve been thinking too,” Zuko said. “I want to find Zhao.”

Iroh was silent. Zuko knelt at his uncle’s feet, head bowed.

“Uncle, I know this is a disappointment to you.”

“Disappointment?” Iroh shook his head. “These are moral choices, nephew. What matters is your decision, not whether your decision disappoints me.”

“It’s not about revenge,” Zuko said. “I know you think it is, but it isn’t.”

Iroh lifted his nephew’s chin. Zuko’s eyes were bright with suppressed emotion.

Iroh sighed, patting the seat next to him. “Please, let’s talk face to face. I can’t have a conversation with you when you’re on your knees.”

Zuko sat, trying to keep his breathing even.

“Azula told me this is what Zhao does,” he said. “When he captures prisoners, he rapes them. It isn’t just me, Uncle.”

Iroh took his nephew’s hand, but said nothing.

“I have to stop him,” Zuko continued, urgency building in his voice. “He’s going to keep hurting people. Destroying people.”

“Do you think of yourself as destroyed?”

Zuko looked down.

“Oh Zuko.”

He looked like a child, staring hesitantly at his knees, and sometimes Iroh had to remind himself that he wasn’t, not anymore. He had dreams, every now and then, of Zuko as a child. In these dreams Iroh had come back from the war in time to save Zuko meaningfully from himself, instead of the half-measures he had taken in life, still blinded by grief and afraid—yes, he had to admit it—afraid to love a child again with his full heart. By the time he became aware of the hold Ozai had on Zuko, it was too late to give the boy direction.

Of course, he had been trying ever since.

“I have to stop him,” Zuko repeated.

“I’m not sure that killing Zhao is the best way to stop him.”

“So I’m just supposed to let him go around _raping_ people?”

“Nephew, I think you are well intentioned,” Iroh said carefully. “But I wonder how much of your desire to find Zhao is driven by the desire to reconcile what happened to you with your vision of yourself.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“I think Zhao will meet his own justice, and I think your time can be better spent.”

“Spent doing what?”

“Preparing to be Fire Lord.”

Zuko looked baffled.

“This war won’t last forever,” Iroh continued. “It is rapidly drawing to a close. The Avatar and his friends are close to defeating Ozai, and I believe that they will do it. When that time comes, you must be ready to be the king your nation needs.”

“I don’t want to be Ozai,” he whispered.

“The Fire Nation does not need another Ozai.” Iroh lifted his nephew’s chin, watching his face intently. “It needs a Zuko.”

—

Zuko swung into Song’s bedroom animated by a kind of energy he had forgotten. She was sitting at her desk, finishing a letter; her brown hair was pulled back, clear light from the window flushing her face. She looked up. He was standing in the doorway in his training clothes, shirtless, bouncing on his heels, grinning at her.

“Zuko?”

He bent down and began kissing her neck. He was warm from the sun and exertion, smelling like smoke and fresh sweat. She pulled him closer, fingers smoothing back the wet hair at his temples.

“I wanna fuck you,” Zuko mumbled into her shoulder. He felt her startle against his lips.

“Is everything okay?”

He laughed.

“I feel amazing,” he said, kissing her. “ _You_ feel amazing. I feel like I’m about to take over the world.”

He picked Song up and tumbled into bed with her, rolling until his legs straddled her.

“This is… sudden,” Song said. She looked up at him cautiously. He softened, taking her hand between his palms, and kissed her wrist.

“I just… I feel so powerful. I felt like I had no power at all and now I feel… like I’m strong again.”

She grinned back at him.

“I take it training went well today?” She reached up and ran her hand down his torso. He was well muscled now, though not excessively so, his strength mainly hidden under his flesh. His shoulders took her breath away.

“Do you still think I’m gorgeous?” Zuko asked.

“You’ve always been fucking gorgeous.”

“I’ll fuck you, gorgeous.”

He pinned Song’s arms back, pushing his hard-on into her thigh. He had a shit-eating grin, cocky but a little vulnerable, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that this could fall apart at any moment. She had seen how easily Zuko’s mood changed, how much effort he put into controlling it. She couldn’t watch him train for that reason, although she had tried. It was the same: her heart in her throat as he summoned an enormous flame and tried to control it, overcome with certainty that at any time he might lose his grip and turn that force in on himself.

“You’re terrible at flirting, you know.”

“I’m out of practice.”

“And here I thought you were training.”

“I was focusing more on advanced sequences.”

“More advanced than flirting?”

Zuko nodded, bending in close to her face. His eyes looked almost feverish, glazed with wanting. He licked very slowly from her collarbone to her lower lip, which he sucked until her crotch ached. “I’m much better at fucking,” he breathed.

“Fuck, Zuko.”

“Since you asked so nicely.”

He pulled down her trousers while she helped him wriggle out of his. He ground into her leg with his swollen cock. “Come on, baby,” Song murmured. “That’s it.” When he was fully erect, he planted his hands to either side of her head, lowering himself gently into her.

“Oh. God. Zuko.”

He whined under his breath, a little paralyzed with desire.

“I wanted—this,” Zuko gasped, working deeper into her. “I wanted you.”

“I know, baby.”

“To show you—I’m strong. To show you—my body.”

He took her hand and pushed it against his chest, so she could feel his muscles straining, his torso glossed with sweat. Then he sank into her until their hip-bones touched.

“To—show—you—who—I— _am_.” He thrust into her triumphantly, pounding until he shuddered finally and gave out, crumpling.

“Baby? Did you come?”

He was lying on his side, hissing through his teeth. Song reached out and touched the skin over his heart. For about a minute the only sounds in the room were Zuko’s pained, shallow breath and his heart throbbing in her ears.

“Does it feel okay?” he said quietly.

She looked up at him, paralyzed.

“You’re skipping beats,” she whispered.

Song ran to the kitchen and came back with a bowl of water. She came back to find him doubled over, his hands covering his head. Frantic, she pressed her fingers under his jaw. But he wasn’t having a heart attack, yet. He was just very afraid.

She unfolded him gently, shifting his head into her lap.

“Shhhh,” Song said. “I need you to listen to me. Breathe in and out as regularly as you can. That’s it. Deep and slow.”

She dipped her hand into the bowl and pushed the glowing water into his heart, feeling him stiffen as the cold set in. “Deep and slow,” she reminded him, reaching in.

The channels were wrecked. She guided the water through a malformed ventricle, feeling out the shape, easing the walls back like clay. Like rebuilding a sandcastle, she thought bitterly. She lost sense of time. When she came out again, summer dusk was crowding the windows, purple shadows on the floor. Zuko was sleeping in her lap, drained.

She untied his hair and pulled him gently under the sheets, wrapping them both in the blanket. He stirred.

“You’re lucky you’re gorgeous,” Song said. “Or just lucky, period.”

He nuzzled blindly into her neck.

“Lucky to be born,” he murmured.

She stared up at the ceiling. Unbelievable. After all that, he had kept taking the herbs. And it had happened, the thing she feared most. He had made his life her responsibility again.

“I don’t want to be mad at you right now, Zuko. Mostly because you’re half asleep and it would be wasted on you.”

“Warm,” Zuko agreed, burrowing into her chest.

“I’m also really goddamn tired.”

She stroked his hair and told him she would be mad at him in the morning. And she was.


	15. You won’t always be

He didn’t fully understand what was going on. He was propped up in Song’s bed, smothered in blankets, and his uncle and Song were mad at him. Iroh had a stern, heartbroken expression; Song just looked pissed. Everything they said was word-shaped, but as it left their mouths it turned sideways and he strained to find any meaning. He tried to read their lips and failed. They looked far away.

He surged up with pain and vomited over the side of the bed. He was very cold. He didn’t understand.

Song peeled back the blankets and began rubbing his naked back. The skin was flushed, burning hot.

“I keep trying to be mad at him,” she complained.

“He makes it difficult,” Iroh agreed lightly, but he was worried. “Is it his heart again?”

“I don’t think so. I think he’s in withdrawal now from the herbs. And maybe in a little bit of shock from what happened.”

Zuko vomited again.

“Of course, he wouldn’t have been shocked if he had listened to a word I told him.”

“My nephew is very stubborn.”

“He doesn’t respect me.”

“I think it has little to do with respect,” Iroh said. “I’ve found that it’s hard for Zuko to accept that other people care about him. So he tends to make decisions as if they only impact himself.” He squeezed Song’s shoulders. “You are a very capable young lady, my dear. A formidable healer. I am sure Zuko respects you.”

Song was quiet, rubbing slow circles into his back. The skin was papery and dry, like Zuko might burn up at any moment. She gestured toward the bowl on the nightstand and bent a thin line of water into his skin. His back arched. He cried out and fell trembling against her.

Iroh got to his feet.

“What do you think of some nourishing barley tea?” he suggested.

“I’m not sure he’ll be able to keep it down,” Song said doubtfully.

“Well, we can let him try,” Iroh said, heading for the kitchen. “If not, more for the two of us.”

Iroh found it difficult to watch Zuko without seeing an image of Ozai superimposed over him: memories of his brother sick as a dog in the military tents, Iroh pulling his hair back as he vomited, or finding Ozai in the mornings, stupefied by his hangover and covered in sick. He would ease Ozai out of soiled robes, bring him a bowl of water and heat it so that Iroh could clean him off in private, without the men having to witness one of their commanding officers stumbling to the river.

He had always tried never to drink around Zuko, never sure of the example his father might be setting for him at the dinner table. Fear of becoming his brother was, Iroh had understood later in life, part of what had driven his interest in tea.

“It’s barley tea from the mountains,” Iroh said, carrying in the tray. “In the high altitude the leaves grow twice as small, but twice as rich.”

Song was channeling more water, bending a bright stream around his nephew’s forehead, like a diadem.

“He’s really burning up,” she said, touching his back. “Do you think we can get him to the stream?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’m sorry about the tea,” she said.

“The marvelous thing about barley tea: it is just as good, if not better, cold.”

Song wanted to help carry him, but Iroh picked up his nephew as if he were weightless. Zuko burned silently against his chest.

They didn’t speak until they reached the stream. Iroh eased Zuko down, propping his head in his lap. Song lowered her hands into the water. They watched it shine.

“Were you this dumb when you were younger?” she asked.

“If not more so,” Iroh said cheerfully. “In my youth I tried to take Ba Sing Se.”

“Every time I think he’s learned, he hasn’t.”

“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t listening,” Iroh said. He smoothed his nephew’s hair back from his face. “I’ve found that teaching Zuko is a little like wearing away at a rock.”

Seeing Song’s alarmed expression, he added: “A relatively soft rock!”

“How reassuring.”

“Something like sandstone, let’s say. He takes a bit of the lesson every time, and at the end of the process he is changed.”

Song was quiet.

“If he doesn’t stop,” she said, “I’m leaving him. I’m not going to watch him kill himself.”

Iroh’s face was consumed with emotion before he could control himself again.

Ozai bent over in the tent, a healer feeling nervously at his stomach. The man had been brought over under cover of darkness, so no one would guess at Ozai’s incapacity. Ozai was yellow, shaky, furious. “It’s your liver, my lord,” the healer said cautiously. “It’s swollen up.”

“So take care of it,” Ozai said through his teeth, waving his hand. It was a gesture that suggested liver problems were easy to shoo away as cats.

“Prince Ozai,” the healer said nervously. “Forgive me. It’s a condition caused by… inflammation.”

“Then take care of _that_.”

“The inflammation is caused by excessive… by immoderate… by drinking, my lord.”

Ozai was silent. Then he sliced his hand forcefully across his chest, sending out an arc of flame. The healer stumbled back on his hands, gasping.

“Out!” Ozai roared. “Out, out!”

Iroh stood between his brother and the healer, giving the man time to scurry out of the tent.

“I’m not going to let you destroy yourself,” Iroh warned. “If you think I’ll stand by and watch—”

Ozai laughed, a sickly laugh that caught and dragged in his throat.

“How adorable!” he gasped. “You think I _care_.”

“You need help, Ozai.”

“I never asked you for _help_. I never asked you for _anything_. It’s your own stupidity and stubbornness that made you provide it.”

“You’re my brother,” Iroh said, incredulous. “Do you really think—"

Ozai spat at his feet.

“Go, then. Out! Out with you too.”

“I’ll go if you want me gone,” Iroh said, backing out of the tent. In the morning he wrote to his father and asked him to call Ozai home.

Song touched the older man’s shoulder. “Iroh, I’m sorry.”

“My dear, you have nothing to be sorry about. It’s just old memories.”

He looked down at Zuko’s face in his hands, considering the ways in which he was not like his father.

“What was he like, as a boy?”

“He was brought up in a household where there was a lot of pain and anger,” Iroh said frankly. “But he was always a very sweet child. As if he didn’t entirely notice. Not for years.”

“There’s a lot of child in him still, I think,” Song said. She stroked Zuko’s hand under the water. “I meant what I said, about leaving. I love him, though.”

“He’s very lovable.”

Zuko whimpered and shifted, pressing his forehead into Iroh’s hands. Iroh hissed softly, as if he had brushed against a hot pan.

“Maybe I should make some of this into ice,” she said, looking skeptically at the water. “But he’s so weak. I’m afraid the shock will be too much.”

“Give the water a little time.”

“I can make a poultice. Or maybe we can build a tub, and bring him inside. I don’t want him out here when the sun goes down.”

“Let’s see where we are in a few hours’ time. Fevers are patient things.”

“I didn’t want to be in this position again,” Song said quietly.

Iroh squeezed her hand.

“You won’t always be,” he said.


	16. Summer on his face

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't do drugs, guys.

When he came to, he was in a cool drift, summer on his face, water tugging at his skin. The world was too bright even with his eyes closed. He reached out and hit smoky air, then someone’s hand.

“Iroh, he’s awake!”

Someone pulled him out of the water. He tried to open his eyes and shut them quickly, white blooming at the back of his mind.

“I mean, he’s a little bit awake.”

“Nephew, can you hear me?”

“I think the light’s too much for him. Should we bring him inside?”

Soft fabric drying him, kisses on his wrists. Swept up again, head and arms too heavy to move, yanking him down to the earth. He faded out.

When Zuko woke up, he was in his bed and the room was very still. The windows were shuttered, all the candles gone out. The air had a gray quality that he found oddly satisfying. It didn’t hurt to see now.

Song, napping in a chair at his bedside, stirred as soon as she felt his eyes on her face. She reached anxiously for his hands.

“Hey,” he mumbled. His mouth felt weighted.

“Can you hear me?”

“Am I not supposed to?”

She hugged him fiercely.

“You’re such an idiot,” she whispered. “I’m so glad you’re awake.”

Words were difficult. He had questions he didn’t know how to form.

“Where was I?”

“You were here. You were in and out, mostly out, for more than a week.” You were dying, she didn’t say. You were dying for days and days until I saved you. “What do you remember? Does anything hurt?”

“It’s not…” Zuko closed his eyes, vertigo swallowing the room and spitting it out sideways. “It’s just hard.”

“You poisoned yourself, more or less.” The bed shifted around him as Song climbed in next to him, sinking her head into his chest. “In the end I had to bend it out of you. I think every time you took them, it built up.”

He looked at her blearily, his face a thin white smudge, eyes smeared with blue shadows. She could see him struggle to get the question out.

“Zuko, the herbs. It was the herbs, okay?”

He was panicking, in a half-asleep way. It was like watching someone drown in honey.At first Song thought he was panicking because he knew what she was talking about, and then she realized he was panicking because he didn’t.

“I’m so tired.”

“You’re okay. You’re okay.” She kissed his temple and he tasted strongly of salt, something sour underneath it. “Your uncle made some bone-marrow broth. Will you let me help you?”

He closed his eyes.

“It’s hard,” he said.

She came back with a bowl fresh from the pot. “Can you sit up for me?”

Zuko was breathing raggedly into his pillow. It was terrifying. He was terrifying her, how easy it would be to lose him again.

He looks dead, Song kept thinking.

“We’ll do it together,” she said, hitching him up by the armpits. When the spoon came to his mouth, he drank in the same unsteady way he breathed. They got through most of the bowl, though, a little warmth returning to his cheeks. He looks dead, she worried, he looks dead. The words kept pulsing through her mind.

She tried to help him finish, but in the end Zuko looked so miserable that she put the bowl down and curled him into her, hands over his hands, back tucked into her chest. She felt his wisps of shallow breathing, the warm thud of his heart.

“You were poisoned but the poison’s gone,” she said. She repeated it over and over, mostly to reassure herself.

Slowly his breathing began to match hers. The longer she held him, the more regular it grew, as if the rise and fall of her chest was reminding him how it worked—how air eased into the body when you weren’t dying or dead.When she woke up it was dark and he was sleeping peacefully in her arms, like the worst had never happened. Like nothing had happened at all.


	17. I banked myself like a fire

“I know I owe you answers, but I think if I explain, it’ll make things worse.”

They were drinking tea in the garden, Iroh having gone to the kitchen for more hot water. It was a bright, late-summer afternoon, the two of them curled together on the white bench. Zuko’s arm was wrapped protectively around Song’s shoulders. The gesture was sweet but almost laughable; he looked so fragile, eyes still a little dead, but when he held her he looked proud, like he really was keeping her safe.

His strength was coming back slowly. While Zuko was sick, he had lost muscle, and even now he looked small and undefined. (“He looks like the last bit of a piece of soap,” Iroh had commented to Song, while his nephew slept. She looked at him, a little offended. “What? I can say it because I love him.”) He seemed calmer now, although it was hard to say whether that was entirely a good thing. Had the fight gone out of him? What had he been fighting, anyway? Most of the last week had been spent finding Zuko asleep in some corner of the house, or curled up under a tree.

“I don’t want to interrogate you about it,” Song said. “And I don’t want to make you feel badly about it. But I’m trying to understand, because I want to understand you. The way you think about things.”

Zuko was quiet.

“I told you what would happen,” she said, “and I told you what it would do to me and Iroh. But you still did it. Why?”

“This is going to sound really dumb.”

“I’m sure,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“I thought you wouldn’t notice when I died.”

She stared at him.

“You thought I wouldn’t notice you were dead?”

“Not like that!” he said hastily. “I mean—I thought—I thought maybe I would die on a trail somewhere, or in the water, and you wouldn’t know, or you wouldn’t be there, and you wouldn’t have to intervene. You said it would be hard for you and Uncle if you had to intervene.”

“I don’t think I know what to say.”

“It was stupid.”

“Did you want to die?”

Zuko hesitated.

“I didn’t _not_ want to die. But I wasn’t trying to. I just thought it would happen and I could do it… thoughtfully. In a way that wouldn’t bother anybody.”

Song’s hand was over her mouth.

“But I think I understand now,” Zuko said. “I hadn’t realized that hurting myself could hurt other people. You told me, but I hadn’t really known. I didn’t get it.” He rubbed the back of his neck and trailed off, his voice low and hoarse. “Like I said, it was stupid. I’m a stupid person.”

“Zuko,” Song said. “How did you grow up?”

“Fresh jasmine!” Iroh crowed, bringing the tray into the garden. “This one’s a white tea mix.”

“I don’t really want any more tea,” Zuko said. He pulled his knees into his chest and stared at the grass.

Iroh set the tray on the table.

“Is this a bad time?”

“I would love some tea, Iroh.” Song passed over her cup.

“We should find somewhere else to be,” Zuko said. “I think you were right, Uncle. I think I’m at the end of what I can do here.”

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“I want to clear my mind,” he said. “I want to be able to have emotions without being consumed by them. And I want to help the Avatar defeat my father. I think that’s more important than finding Zhao, because my father has hurt, and will hurt, more people than Zhao can ever capture.” Zuko paused. “I don’t have any idea how to do that specifically, obviously.”

“Then I think you should track down the Avatar,” Iroh said, settling on the bench. “That’s a good place to start. It’s something you have a lot of experience with.”

Iroh poured him a cup of tea and gently nudged him with it. Zuko drank slowly. He let go of his knees, settling into a seated position. There was a softness to him now that made Song’s heart surge. Before he had moved cagily, as if crowded out on all sides by sharp edges that could rip him open at any moment. Now he occupied a kind of languid present tense. When she held him at night, he didn’t wince or stiffen anymore if her hand brushed his stomach. Instead he pulled her closer.

“You don’t have your strength back,” she said. “How are you going to travel around looking for the Avatar when you keep falling asleep over dinner?”

“It looks like weakness, but it's not,” Zuko said. “I don't know how to explain it. I was out of control. Almost dying... It tamped me down in way that showed me I how _could_ be tamped down. That you can moderate your energy, vanish a little, until everything's in balance.” He shrugged. “I'm doing it too much now, which isn't exactly balance, but I'm still figuring out how to do it.”

Iroh laughed, utterly delighted, and ruffled his nephew’s hair. Zuko protested mildly, ducking, but he was smiling too.

“Banking yourself, like a fire,” Iroh said, grinning. “You can bank a fire with earth, so that it neither spins out of control nor goes out. You figured out how to bank yourself, so that you aren’t consumed.”

“That’s what you were trying to tell me, wasn’t it,” Zuko said.

His uncle shrugged.

“Hey, I wasn’t hiding anything from you,” Iroh said. “I hadn’t done it before myself.” He patted his belly. “I think I do most of my banking here.”

Zuko turned to Song, taking her hand. He ran his fingers over her knuckles as if he was trying to memorize the shape of her.

“I won’t leave right away,” he said. “But soon. I won’t wait for things to be perfect, though. There’s no time for that.”

“I’ll go with you,” Iroh said. “If you’re going to stay awake you’ll need someone making you tea.”

“Uncle,” Zuko said, tearing up. “I want to be a better nephew to you. And I want to be better for Song.”

“I know you mean it, Zuko. And that means… very much to me,” Iroh said.

“I was like my father, in a way,” Zuko said, not meeting his uncle’s eyes. “And I’m saying this now because I want both of you to hear it. I wanted power and I was reckless about it. There was a way I wanted to feel and so I went after it.”

Iroh looked at him with a strange expression, both grateful and pained.

“I was like my father,” Zuko continued, “and that must have been hard for you to see. I’m sorry I did that to you, Uncle. I am so, so sorry. I won’t do it again. I’ve changed. I’m going to change.”

His uncle swept him up in a hug, tears running into his beard. “I never thought you wouldn’t,” he whispered into Zuko’s ear. “I’ve always known who you are.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever known,” Zuko said.


	18. Where there’s a channel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't thank you all enough for reading and kudos-ing and commenting. As I said, this is my first fanfiction since, um, before iPhones. And it's all pretty personal for me. 
> 
> If you're looking for more hurt-comfort with Zuko, check out "Fatherlord." I've got a few other pieces planned out too. 
> 
> Don't be ashamed of who you are, guys.

“I wonder what’ll happen to this place.”

It was their last night in the house. They were in Song’s room, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Zuko had been trying to meditate, staring into the candles until their yellow hearts blurred, but every time he got his breath under control he thought about the Avatar killing his father and the flames shot up.

“Probably more of the same,” Song said. “It’ll pass in and out of different hands. Mostly it’ll fall apart.”

Zuko looked at her strangely.

“You know it’s abandoned, right?” she asked. “It’s part of an abandoned village.”

“I don’t think I thought it through,” Zuko said slowly. He splayed his palm against the wall, like if he could try hard enough, he could feel out the memories of the house. There was a lump in his throat.

“There was a raid a couple months before Iroh came to me. That’s how I knew where we should go.” 

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Or sad. But I am.”

“I think it’s a good thing that you feel sad about it. You should.”

He thought about everything differently now: the modest beds, the little kitchen, the white bench in the courtyard overswept by cherry trees. The garden would probably dissolve over time, the boundaries fading away as weeds broke through the paving stones, and the wilderness would come back. The memories of the village would be lost.

On the other hand, so would memories of the raid.

He let his hand drop.

“It'll be strange to go,” she said.

"I don't know how I feel about it," Zuko said. "About being part of the world again.”

About people looking at him, he didn't say.

Song took his hand from his face—he has fiddling with his hair—and held it tightly.

"It's what you do that matters. You know that, right?”

"The Avatar and his friends will notice. They'll say something.”

At first it would be physical, especially when they first crossed paths again, before they trusted him. What happened to _you_ , they would say. And he didn't think he could tell them.

He tried not to look at his reflection, even now. He was about fifteen pounds overweight, maybe twenty, and it hung heavily in his gut and ass. The Water Tribe girl and her brother would be cruel about it, at least at first.

_Really let yourself go, didn't you, Zuko?_

The nightmares didn't come as often as they used to, but when they did, they came with shocking force, leaving him trembling and wet in bed. Sometimes he still lost control and soiled himself.

They would have questions, obviously.

“What are they going to say?” Song asked. “They need a firebender, right?”

“Right.”

“And besides, you look good.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Hey, I mean it. You look... solid.”

Zuko covered his face.

“I mean—” Song said hastily, “ _not_ solid. Not solid at all. Completely unsolid.”

“Thanks.”

"Sturdy? Can I call you sturdy?”

“I don't look like a warrior,” he said. “I look undisciplined.”

“But that isn't true,” Song said. “You know that. You’re incredibly disciplined. Who you are right now is the result of unbelievable discipline.”

“Not enough, apparently.” He was thinking about his belly, how it hung with him when he ducked and rolled and executed kicks. He shook his head to clear it. He was never a warrior, anyway. He was a king.

“It doesn't matter,” he said quietly. “It's fine.”

“Do you want me to come?”

Zuko looked at her with a funny expression on his face. Song punched his arm lightly.

“You asshole,” she said. “Not like that.”

“Well,” he said. “Why not like that?”

He leaned in and kissed her, hands searching under her shirt, gently palming her stomach. She melted into him, kissing slowly down his throat.

“Can I—”

She eased off his shirt and did what she always did, the thing that stunned him every time: she looked overwhelmed by him, out of her mind with wanting.

“God,” she said. “You’re gorgeous.”

They navigated to the bed, peeling off each other’s clothes. As they kissed, Zuko warmed his palms and trailed them down her back and shoulders. She fell apart, boneless, and moaned into his mouth.

“ _Fuck_ , baby.”

She kissed his knees and worked her way up, leaving a hot soft bloom along his inner thighs, then she kissed his cock. He doubled over, gasping. The candles surged.

“Baby,” Song murmured. “I want you.” She licked his cock slowly, until he was red and weeping. “Do you want this?” 

Zuko groaned.

“Use your words, baby.” She teased his tongue down his cock.

“Yes,” he hissed. “Yes, yes, _yes_.”

Song splayed her hand on his stomach, and the sudden contact made him jerk forward, swelling. Her mouth engulfed his cock. He rocked back and forth as she tasted him fully, tongue lapping at his hard edges.

“Oh my God, Song,” he moaned. “God, God. You’re gonna destroy me.”

“I’m not sure destruction is the goal,” she said, letting him slip free for a moment. “But how about we compromise.” She crawled up his chest and breathed into his ear: “I’ll just fuck you until you forget your name.”

Zuko wrapped his arms around her and flipped her onto her back, eating up her body with sloppy, greedy kisses. He nudged his cock into her so slowly that her knuckles turned white, gripping his arms.

“Zuko!”

“Don’t forget it,” he rasped. He fastened his mouth to hers as he slipped fully in, so that her moans were swallowed in his throat.

He fucked her leisurely, pulling her hips up so he could keep kissing her, drinking her up until he ran out of air. When he flagged, Song toppled him. She pinned his wrists back and nibbled at his ears. “I’ll take it from here, baby,” she said, grinding into him until she came.

When Zuko came, the pleasure was almost blinding. He sprawled on his back, trembling, for so long that Song eased him loose and rested her ear on his chest.

“Do I…” Zuko trailed off. “I mean, is it…”

She kissed his heart and let her head drop against him again.

“You’re okay,” she said. “You’re just excited.”

Zuko exhaled, stroking her hair.

“I wish we didn’t have to worry about it.”

“Then don’t.” Song kissed his heart again. “Let me come with you.”

“Song.”

“I’ll take care of you.”

“I don’t want you in the war,” he said quietly. 

“Zuko, I’m already in the war. I was born in the war. We all were.”

He held her face in his hands, considering, looking lost. He had concerns he didn’t know how to frame.

“I don’t want to make a decision out of selfishness,” he said. He hesitated, trying to get the words right. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Then let it be my decision.”

Zuko thought about the people he had lost in the war, himself included. He rolled over, arms settling around her. She made sense. She felt like mercy, the last kind thing that had happened to him.

“I guess it always was,” he said.

Song squeezed his hands. 

“If you didn’t say yes, you know I would’ve come after you anyway,” she added.

They lay together in the dark, the candles fading out. The smell of the garden through the open window, the hum and purr of insects. His uncle was snoring faintly somewhere in the house. She was sleeping in his arms, soft and breakable. He looked out into the darkness and wondered if he would hurt her, in the end.


End file.
